In our book – REGENERATION: The Future of Community in a Permacrisis World, we point out that in the US today, we see that our politicians can’t even stand up to the NRA, let alone address climate collapse.  Instead, they distract us with culture wars and fake controversy – banning books, and literally canceling democracy via gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Shouldn’t our governments be promoting the Common Good?  Isn’t that the definition of regenerative governance?  Here’s a citizen’s checklist we compiled – does your government check the boxes?

If you were to grade your elected government officials against their support  for the Common Good, you might get a better idea if they really care about you and your children’s children.

Christian Sarkar, Philip Kotler, and Enrico Foglia are the co-founders of The Regenerative Marketing Institute, and the joint authors of REGENERATION: The Future of Community in a Permacrisis World.

Comparisons between the United States under Trump and Germany during the Hitler era are once again being made following the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Even in the eyes of German history scholars like myself, who had earlier warned of the troubling nature of such analogies, Trump’s strategy to remain in power has undeniably proved that he has fascist traits. True to the fascist playbook, which includes hypernationalism, the glorification of violence and a fealty to anti-democratic leaders that is cultlike, Trump launched a conspiracy theory that the recent election was rigged and incited violence against democratically elected representatives of the American people.

This is not to say that Trump has suddenly emerged as a new Hitler. The German dictator’s lust for power was inextricably linked to his racist ideology, which unleashed a global, genocidal war. For Trump, the need to satisfy his own ego seems to be the major motivation of his politics.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Trump is just as much of a mortal danger to American democracy as Hitler was to the Weimar Republic. The first democracy on German soil did not survive the onslaught of the Nazis.

If America is to survive the attacks of Trump and his supporters, its citizens would do well to look to the fate of Germany and the lessons it offers Americans looking to save, heal and unite their republic.

From Nazi ideology to democracy

The Weimar Republic, the first democracy on German soil, was a short-lived one. Founded in 1918, it managed to survive the political turmoil of the early 1920s, but succumbed to the crisis brought about by the Great Depression. It is therefore not the history of the failed Weimar Republic but rather that of the Federal Republic, founded in 1949, that provides important clues.

Just like Weimar, the West German Federal Republic was founded in the aftermath of a devastating war, World War II. And, just like Weimar, the new German state found itself confronted with large numbers of citizens who were deeply anti-democratic. Even worse, many of them had been involved in the Holocaust and other heinous crimes against humanity.

During the first postwar decade, a majority of Germans still believed that Nazism had been a good idea, only badly put into practice. This was a sobering starting point, but Germany’s second democracy managed not just to survive but even to flourish, and it ultimately developed into one of the most stable democracies worldwide.

How?

Denazification: ‘Painful and amoral process’

For one, there was a legal reckoning with the past, beginning with the trial and prosecution of some Nazi elites and war criminals. That happened first at the Nuremberg Trials, organized by the Allies in 1945 and 1946, in which leading Nazis were tried for genocide and crimes against humanity. A further significant reckoning happened during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the mid-1960s, in which 22 officials of the SS, the elite paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party, were tried for the roles they played at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

To protect the new German democracy from the political divisions that had plagued parliamentary government during the Weimar period, an electoral law was introduced that aimed to prevent the proliferation of small extremist parties. This was the “5 percent” clause, which stipulated that a party must win a minimum of 5% of the national vote to receive any representation in parliament.

In a similar vein, Article 130 of the German Criminal Code made “incitement of the masses” a criminal offense to stop the spread of extremist thought, hate speech and calls for political violence.

Yet as important and admirable as these efforts were in exorcising Germany’s Nazi demons, they alone are not what kept Germans on a democratic footing after 1945. So, too, did the successful integration of anti-democratic forces into the new state.

This was a painful and amoral process. In January 1945, the Nazi Party had some 8.5 million members – that is, significantly more than 10% of the entire population. After the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, many of them claimed that they had been only nominal members.

Such attempts to get off scot-free did not work for the Nazi luminaries tried at Nuremberg, but it certainly did work for many lower-level Nazis involved in countless crimes. And with the advent of the Cold War, even people outside of Germany were willing to look past these offenses.

Denazification, the Allies’ attempt to purge German society, culture and politics, as well as the press, economy and judiciary, of Nazism, petered out quickly and was officially abandoned in 1951. As a result, many Nazis were absorbed into an emerging new society that officially committed itself to democracy and human rights.

Konrad Adenauer, the first West German chancellor, said in 1952 that it was time “to finish with this sniffing out of Nazis.” He did not say this lightheartedly; after all, he had been an opponent of the Nazis. To him, this “communicative silencing” of the Nazi past – a term coined by the German philosopher Hermann Lübbe – was necessary during these early years to integrate former Nazis into the democratic state.

Where one was going, advocates of this approach argued, was more important than where one had been.

A dignified life

For many, this failure to achieve justice was too heavy of a price to pay for democratic stability. But the strategy ultimately bore fruit. Despite the recent growth of the far right and nationalist “Alternative for Germany” party, Germany has remained democratic and has not yet become a threat to world peace.

At the same time, there were increasing efforts to confront the Nazi past, especially after the upheaval of 1968, when a new generation of young Germans challenged the older generation about their behavior during the Third Reich.

Another crucial factor helped make Germany’s democratic transition a success: an extraordinary period of economic growth in the postwar period. Most ordinary Germans benefited from this prosperity, and the new state even created a generous welfare system to cushion them against the harsh forces of the free market.

In short, more and more Germans embraced democracy because it offered them a dignified life. As a result, philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ concept of “constitutional patriotism” – as one interpreter put it, that citizens’ political attachment to their country “ought to center on the norms, the values and, more indirectly, the procedures of a liberal democratic constitution” – eventually came to replace older, more rabid forms of nationalism.

In the coming weeks and months, Americans will debate the most effective ways to punish those who instigated the recent political violence. They will also consider how to restore the trust in democracy of the many millions who have given their support to Donald Trump and still believe the lies of this demagogue.

Defenders of American democracy would do well to study carefully the painful but ultimately successful approach of the Federal Republic of Germany to move beyond fascism.

The United States finds itself in a different place and time than postwar Germany, but the challenge is similar: how to reject, punish and delegitimize the powerful enemies of democracy, pursue an honest reckoning with the violent racism of the past, and enact political and socioeconomic policies that will allow all to lead a dignified life.

Sylvia Taschka, Senior Lecturer of History, Wayne State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The cover of the May 20, 2020 issue of Forbes magazine carries a picture of Larry Ellison, billionaire founder of Oracle Corporation. On page 114, there’s a Billionaires Index that runs six more pages in very small print.  The following becomes clear:

1. Almost every country has billionaires. Even Venezuela and Zimbabwe each has one billionaire.
2. The U.S. has the largest number of billionaires, around 624.
3. China has the second largest number of billionaires, 390. Not bad for a country professing communism. In fact, the number of Chinese billionaires is even higher, because Hong Kong is listed separately with 66 billionaires, and independent Taiwan adds additional 40 Chinese billionaires.
4. Germany has 110 billionaires, Russia has 102 billionaires, followed by India with 94 billionaires.
5. Each of the remaining countries has fewer than 100 billionaires, with many in Australia, Canada, France, Switzerland.
6. I would guess that there are more billionaires who were not known by Forbes or not counted because their wealth couldn’t be estimated. This would include royals, dictators, and criminals. I would venture that the world has somewhere between 2,000 to 2,200 billionaires. The estimated total net wealth of the world’s billionaires is over $8 trillion.

Our thesis is that billionaires could become a force for good – especially if their resources were used for the Common Good. There are three way this can happen:

1. The billionaires suddenly realize that the Common Good of the planet is an important goal for them, so they join forces to save humanity and Nature,
2. Our governments make billionaires pay their “fair share” of taxes, or
3. Society decides that billionaires shouldn’t exist, and our governments simply tax them out of existence.

Will the billionaires agree to higher taxes? In the recent US elections, we recall that Bernie Sanders suggested billionaires should be taxed out of existence, while Joe Biden warned us against demonizing the wealthy.

There’s a common myth that there will always be billionaires. And the media worships billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett who illustrate that some billionaires can work for causes that are beyond their own selfish interests.

Where do Billionaires Come From?

We should start by asking where do billionaires come from?  Do they just spring out of the fertile digital soil of Silicon Valley?  Can anyone – with enough hard work – become a billionaire?

So how do you become a billionaire?  Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, explains four sources of wealth:

• Inherited Wealth: around 60 percent of wealth in the US is inherited. The best chance you have of becoming a billionaire is to marry or be born into intergenerational riches.
• Monopolies: Jeff Bezos’ Amazon accounts for nearly 50 percent of all e-commerce retail sales in America. Our patent and trademark systems, which have been extended in duration, create billionaire like George Lucas and Oprah Winfrey.
• Insider Information: Hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen made “hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profits” – through his expertise in insider trading. This is not an isolated incident.
• Politics: You can invest in politicians – or even bet on them, like racehorses – through your timely campaign contributions. Americans for Tax Fairness estimates that Charles Koch and David Koch and/or Koch Industries could save between $1 billion and $1.4 billion combined in income taxes each year from the Trump tax law―and that doesn’t include how much the Koch Industries save in taxes on offshore profits or how much their heirs will benefit from weakening the estate tax.

Good luck with these four strategies.

Without them, the average US worker would have to work for 25 thousand years to become a billionaire.

How has the number of billionaires grown over the past few decades? In 1996 there were 423 billionaires spotted in the wild.  In 2019, that number rose to 2,153. Billionaires constitute just 0.00003 percent of the world population, but they currently own the equivalent of 12 percent of the GWP (gross world product) and a much larger percentage of the total wealth of the world.

Interestingly, even as COVID destroyed the economy, billionaires got richer – to the tune of $10.2 trillion.

The Billionaire’s Defense

Arguments used to defend billionaires are often based on the story that without billionaires, society would not progress – innovation and philanthropy would diminish – making life even worse.  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, worth $70bn, explains this in an appearance on Fox News. Billionaires should not exist in a “cosmic sense,” but in reality most of them are simply “people who do really good things and kind of help a lot of other people. And you get well compensated for that.” He warned about the dangers of ceding too much control over their wealth to the government, allegedly bound to stifle innovation and competition and “deprive the market” of his fellow billionaires’ funding for philanthropy and scientific research.

“Some people think that, okay, well the issue or the way to deal with this sort of accumulation of wealth is, ‘Let’s just have the government take it all,” Zuckerberg said. “And now the government can basically decide, you know, all of the medical research that gets done.”

So who decides what research gets done?  The drug companies?  The billionaires themselves?  There is a serious argument to be made that allowing billionaires to decide societal priorities is profoundly undemocratic.  Should mega-rich donors like Bill Gates drive philanthropy, usurping the role of democratic governments to decide what social ills to tackle and how?

Even in terms of innovation, Zuckerberg is wrong.  The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) reports that while in the 1970s almost all innovation winners came from corporations acting on their own, more recently over two-thirds of the winners have come from partnerships involving business and government, including federal labs and federally-funded university research. Moreover, in 2006, 77 of the 88 U.S. entities that produced award-winning innovations were beneficiaries of federal funding.

Facebook, for all Zuckerberg’s talk about innovation, makes the bulk of its profits from selling access to customer data via advertising.  It’s certainly not a fountain of societal innovation.

Unfortunately, the record of billionaire activism is not always a stellar example upholding human values or even democracy, for that matter.  The John Birch society, for example, was principally backed by Fred Koch, the father of the infamous Koch brothers. The society famously attacked Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, as well as JFK – with a campaign to spread hate just two weeks before his assassination in Dallas. This thread of regressive billionaire activism continues to this day. The John Birch society’s tired slogan – “this is a republic, not a democracy” is now being amplified by the Trumpists.

These are billionaires who are not interested in the Common Good.  In fact, it is their actions that have driven our society to a level of public insecurity and mistrust, not seen since the 60s, or the Civil War, as some have argued. Clearly, not all billionaires are interested in saving the world.

Will Billionaires Solve the World’s Biggest Problems?

Our world is plagued with wicked problems.  Recently, we started a project studying what we can do to mitigate the 7 most Wicked Problems in the world. COVID-19, for example,would be classified under “health and livelihood” and hopefully the new vaccines will get the coronavirus problem under control within a few years.

Note that one of the Wicked7 problems is inequality.  As a problem, it also contributes to other problems such as war and health and livelihood.  Inequality is an insidious and growing problem and it is intrinsically related to the growing number of billionaires in the world.  As the number of billionaires increase, and average incomes remain the same, income inequality grows as a problem.

Given that these wicked problems are an existential threat to our future as a civilization, why is it that the smartest minds in the world are still busy working on algorithms to maximize advertising efficiency or building financial instruments for hedge-fund profits?

What would happen if the world drafted Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jamie Dimon, and Jeff Bezos – gave them a mission to find solutions to “save the planet in the interest of the common good” and then presented their “solutions” to the governments of the world – put them to a global vote? The Big 5 CEOs could afford to be paid nothing for this challenge. Well, isn’t that what they should be working on?  Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, could also be drafted as the project manager of this Manhattan Project to save humanity. Let’s lock them in a “zoom-room” for the next six months and see what they come up with – we’re pretty sure their businesses will continue doing well without batting an eyelid.

Narrowing the Distance between the Rich and the Poor?

We also must ask: what would happen if our governments started working for the Common Good?

What would it mean to the world if we (1) got rid of monopolies, (2) stopped the use of insider information, (3) prevented billionaires from buying off politicians, and (4) made it harder for the billionaires and their corporations to avoid paying taxes?

You can’t – as the late Paul Polak used to say – “donate your way out of poverty.” Billionaires know that just giving money to the poor is not a lasting solution.  The statement is often made “don’t give fish to the hungry, just teach them how to fish.” The task is how to create a better education and better skills in people so that they can create value for others and get paid for the value they create.

A quick review of the history of taxation in the US shows us what’s been going on: for too long, too many wealthy persons have paid taxes on their wealth at a lower rate than their secretaries!  Today’s top U.S. marginal income tax rate is 37%.  This is the rate paid on the last bracket of income, not on the whole income.  The rich person pays substantially less that 37% on his or her total income. The 37% bracket only affects persons earning an annual income of $518,400 or more.

Look at how high the top bracket income tax has been historically.  The rate was almost 80% in World War 1, over 90% in World War II, and pushed down over time by Republicans to a low of 37%.

This 37% top tax rate seems ridiculously lower compared to Scandinavian countries that pay a top income tax rate of 70%. What do Scandinavians get back for this very high marginal tax rate. They get back “freedom from insecurity.”  Scandinavians don’t have to pay for medicines, surgeries, college education, maternity leave, longer vacations, and so on.  The evidence is clear that many Americans might prefer to live in a country with higher taxes on the rich, than in today’s America where at least 15-20% of U.S. citizens can’t meet their basic needs without help.  Yes, most of us have plenty to eat but the important things we need like health care and a college education are priced as luxury goods.

Isn’t it interesting that US citizens have to pay US taxes no matter where in the world they earn their money, but our US corporations don’t have to do the same.  And we thought corporations were people too!

Americans for Tax Fairness points out the  loopholes:

• Tax avoidance through offshore tax loopholes is a significant reason why corporations, which paid one-third of federal revenues 60 years ago, now pay one-tenth of federal revenues.
• U.S. corporations dodge $90 billion a year in income taxes by shifting profits to subsidiaries — often no more than a post office box — in tax havens.
• U.S. corporations hold $2.1 trillion in profits offshore — much in tax havens — that have not been taxed in the U.S.
• General Electric, which uses a loophole for offshore financial profits, earned $27.5 billion in profits from 2008 to 2012 but claimed tax refunds of $3.1 billion.
• Apple made $74 billion from 2009-2012 on worldwide sales (excluding the Americas) and paid almost nothing in taxes to any country.
• 26 profitable Fortune 500 firms paid no federal income taxes from 2008-2012. 111 large, profitable corporations paid zero federal income taxes in at least one of those five years.

The simplest solution is to end tax “deferral.”  Corporations would pay taxes on offshore income the year it is earned, rather than indefinitely avoid paying U.S. income taxes. This would also remove incentives to shift U.S. profits to tax havens, and it would raise $600 billion over 10 years.

Why isn’t this happening?  Ask your local Senator or Congressperson.  Chances are they are too busy raising campaign funds for their re-election.

Passing a higher tax on the rich only slows down the growth of their wealth.   Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have called for a wealth tax. Elizabeth Warren proposed that households should pay an annual 2% tax on their net worth above $50 million, and a 3% tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion.  She recently added possibly raising the billionaire wealth tax rate to 6 percent instead of 3 percent to help pay for “Medicare for All.”  Note that the working poor and the middle class do not pay higher taxes. The wealth tax is only paid by very rich.

Another solution is to raise the estate tax.  Wealthy persons need a plan describing how their wealth should be divided upon their death.  They cannot be allowed to avoid paying estate taxes on their wealth. Married couples won’t pay any inheritance tax on the first $22.36 million in exemptions. The tax on the remaining wealth after exemption is 40 percent.

The estate tax could yield more if two changes occurred:

1. lower the tax-exempt amount to a much lower number, and
2. increase the tax rate on the remaining amount from 40% to a much higher number – say 70%.

The government should increase the estate tax rate in a further effort to reduce the growing concentration of wealth in the U.S.  Yet Republicans argue that higher estate taxes will lead to more avoidance and also lead talented people to work less hard or threaten to leave the country.  I would counter-argue that there are a great many civic-minded talented people waiting to move up the wealth ladder and take their place.  The tough issue is what the government will do with the higher estate taxes? Will it be used by government to increase wages and jobs?  Or will it go into more defense spending and more bureaucracies? Why don’t we ask citizens to decide?

Convincing Billionaires to Consider the Future of the Planet

Let’s return to how to encourage the super-rich to give back more of their wealth to society.  Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett carried out an excellent approach to this problem, with their giving pledge. They recruited billionaires to make a commitment to distribute half of their wealth to philanthropic causes within the next 10 years.  Today 211 billionaires have made this pledge. Furthermore, each billionaire describes the cause(s) that might get his or her “give-back.” There is an argument to be made that if the rich have to “give back” to society, they took too much from society to begin with.

The recruiting effort is continuing.  Imagine how many low income persons would benefit if 2,000 billionaires, not just 211 would implement a giving pledge.

Billionaires face the problem of identifying which giving causes would do the most good.  This problem faces all the billionaires, including the largest ones: Jeff Bezos ($200B), Bill Gates ($98B), Bernard Arnault and family ($76B), Warren Buffett ($67.5B), Larry Ellison ($59B), Amancio Ortega ($55.1B), Mark Zuckerberg ($54.7B), Jim Wolcott ($54.6B), Alice Wolcott ($54.4B), and S. Robson Walton ($54B).

Billionaires prefer giving away their money to their favorite causes rather than giving their money as taxes to the U.S. Treasury.  They want to control who gets the money. They might not want to see the money go to make or buy more weapons of war.

This problem has been dubbed “gilded giving” by the Institute for Policy Studies. Here is their description of the problem:

The charitable sector is currently experiencing a transition from broad-based support across a wide range of donors to top-heavy philanthropy increasingly dominated by a small number of very wealthy individuals and foundations. This has significant implications for the practice of fundraising, the role of the independent nonprofit sector, and the health of our larger democratic civil society.

• Risks to charitable independent sector organizations include increased volatility and unpredictability in funding, making it more difficult to budget and forecast income into the future; an increased need to shift toward major donor cultivation; and an increased bias toward funding heavily major-donor-directed boutique organizations and projects. The increasing power of a small number of donors also greatly increases the potential for mission distortion.
• Risks to the public include an increasingly unaccountable and undemocratic philanthropic sector; the rise of tax avoidance philanthropy; the warehousing of wealth in the face of urgent needs; self-dealing philanthropy; and the increasing use of philanthropy as an extension of power and privilege protection.

This privatization of charity and the job of government does not bode well for democracy or the common good.  Yet there are exceptions.  When Andrew Carnegie, the richest man at the time, decided to start giving back money to good causes, he landed on a brilliant idea.  He wanted to raise the educational level of average Americans. Instead of giving money to colleges, he decided to build public libraries, first in America and later around the world. With public libraries, persons would have access to books and be able to build their knowledge in whatever field of interest. Young students could sit quietly in a library, do their homework and chance on seeing a book that might change their life.

Lessons from the Gilded Age

The U.S. simply needs to look back at history, to our Gilded Age, to see what can be done to curb wealth growth.

President Theodore Roosevelt, elected in 1901, moved to break up the monopolies. John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was split into 34 separate companies, including the predecessors of Exxon, BP and Chevron.

What’s stopping us from doing this today?

We need to convince billionaires that contributing to an equitable and harmonious society is as pleasurable as earning a lot of money.

The Danger to Democracy

Finally, are billionaires a threat to democracy? 

Both Trump and Biden raised a substantial part of their campaign contributions from billionaires.  Apparently the total cost of the 2020 election was close to $14 billion, making it the most expensive election in history and twice as expensive as the previous presidential election cycle! The Institute for Political Innovation points out: although people tend to think of the American political system as a public institution based on high-minded principles, it’s not. Politics behaves according to the same kinds of incentives and forces that shape competition in any private industry.  Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter sound the alarm, and make suggestions on what can be done to unrig our political system.

Rebecca Henderson points out that in the U.S. and the UK, only around 30% of the youngest voters feel that it is “essential” to live in a democracy, compared with upwards of three-quarters of voters born before WWII.

She explains:

If government is the counterweight to the free market, democracy is the force that ensures that governments do not devolve into tyranny, seizing control of the markets in the process. I believe that strengthening democracy is the only way to ensure the widespread survival of free-market capitalism, and with it the prosperity and opportunity that has changed the lives of billions of people. It’s also the only way to tackle the world’s biggest threats, from global warming to inequality. Business has the resources, political power, incentives, and responsibility to make significant progress in this endeavor. Indeed, it has widespread support. People today report trusting their employer more than the government or the media, and a recent global survey finds that 71% of respondents believe that “it is critically important for my CEO to respond to these challenging times.”

So, the final outcome of this debate is political.  And that is not always, as history has taught us, a pleasant outcome.

Studies show that as income inequality grows, so does social unrest and populism.  The threat of fascism increases exponentially.

It’s time to come to our senses as a society, and put a stop to this unbalanced economic system.  Times of crises call out for public leadership in service of the Common Good.  Absent that leadership, businesses have a responsibility to not be silent, and more importantly, to act.

In a Democracy, that means all of us, billionaires, businesses, and citizens, must act in a transparent way to:

1. ensure the public is given access to the truth, and protected from misinformation and “alternative facts.”
2. ensure elections will be fair and free (without the imposition of poll taxes, and other suppression techniques)
3. promote policies for the Common Good, instead of tax-breaks that serve narrow, special interests.

In short, businesses should support Democracy, and protect society from corruption.  Without this basic understanding, we will see a government, institutions, and markets that are no longer trusted by the consumer or the citizen.  We will be unable to react to other, more difficult, challenges, and the government of the people, by the people, and for the people will perish from this Earth.

If you’re a billionaire, ask yourself: what kind of world do I want to leave to my children?

The rest of us should ask ourselves this question as well. Our time as humans on this planet is almost up. Who will lead us?

In our work on cultural narratives, we’ve proposed that cultural narratives create meaning for our place in the world, and provide a map for the journey ahead. The structure of a cultural narrative can be diagrammed as follows:

In politics, the structure of a cultural narrative becomes an ideological framework for living and thinking about the world.

With the case of Trump and Biden, we see a struggle between two narratives: “MAGA” vs the “American Dream.”

Trump’s MAGA narrative can be diagrammed as follows:

The press, of course, cannot bring itself to see this, because to do so would require acknowledgement of their complicity with the existing system.  So they condemn specific incidents of hate or fear, but never connect the dots.

Biden’s American Dream narrative was the original myth of the USA. It is the old story we learned in our textbooks – of the Statue of Liberty and the immigrants who came to this country to create a better life for themselves and their progeny:

Here’s the problem.  While it is still a view that many hold dear, the American Dream lies in tatters because of staggering inequality and the lack of opportunities of upward mobility.  The middle class is shrinking, and everywhere citizens feel the threat of rising unemployment and poverty. COVID has accelerated the crises.

Trump can fool some of the people all of the time.  White supremacists are infiltrating protest groups to incite and cause violence. Trump yells “Law and Order” even while he incites violence. It’s time for our citizens to demand better.

Will Biden be able to bring back the American Dream?  He must acknowledge the mistakes of neoliberalism and globalization and renew the American Dream.

The challenge: get government to work for its citizens again.

Is that a third narrative?

BY BHASKAR CHAKRAVORTI, Tufts University

It has been less than two months since the world scrambled to go into the “Great Lockdown” to slow the spread of COVID-19. Now, many countries are considering their exit strategies. Some have already eased up.

The push is largely economic. There is a lot scientists don’t yet understand about the novel coronavirus, and there is no known cure or vaccine. Many countries are still experiencing a rise in infections. But the lockdowns have played havoc with people’s livelihoods. Entire economies are in meltdown: The International Monetary Fund predicts the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Just as each nation chose a different route into lockdown, each is likely to choose its own exit path. I have launched a research initiative, “Imagining a Digital Economy for All 2030,” with a focus on the post-pandemic global economy. We have been studying the characteristics of 40 countries that help explain how governments and citizens have acted to contain the COVID-19 outbreak and their preparedness to take an economy online. Our analysis offers ways to gauge which countries are best prepared for a safe exit.

It seems clear that the safest idea is to reopen slowly, in phases, while remaining ready to reenter lockdown in case of new outbreaks. By looking at how well a nation managed the first wave of the pandemic, and how ready it is to work remotely by falling back onto the online economy, we now understand how prepared nations are to restart economic activity without triggering fresh rounds of public health disasters.

Public health and technology

Not every country is well equipped to ease itself out of a lockdown safely.

A nation’s ability to manage the outbreak relies on many factors: the willingness of governments to take decisive action; citizen compliance in staying home and social distancing; and capacity for adequate testing for the disease, including “contact tracing” – tracking down the people who have been in contact with those infected. Those characteristics are also key to managing future outbreaks.

In parallel, not every country is ready to shift much of its economic activity online. Around the world, not everyone has affordable, reliable internet service; or the jobs, devices and digital apps that would let them work productively from home; or ways to make payments and get public services online. In some countries – though not all – workers who can’t do their jobs remotely can reduce their in-person contact by using digital transactions, whether it is for carry-out food, e-commerce or receiving bailout checks and unemployment benefits.

Countries such as Germany, New Zealand and South Korea are strong in both disease-fighting and digital-economy preparedness. Their economic activity isn’t as dependent on in-person interactions, and authorities can respond quickly if loosened rules result in a spike in cases. In contrast, the U.S., Italy and Japan face different challenges before they can safely lift lockdowns.

Difficulties ahead for the US

Compared to countries worldwide, the U.S. is more prepared to operate parts of its economy online, but its response to the outbreak indicates there may be difficulties after reopening. States were inconsistent in issuing stay-at-home orders, and citizens’ compliance with the rules has varied widely.

Officials have been unable to test in large numbers, and only four states meet, or are on track to meet, the contact-tracing required to control future outbreaks.

The results are evident in the mortality rates in the U.S. and other, better-prepared countries: On May 5, the key statistic shows the U.S. death rate was more than three times that of Germany, nearly 200 times those in New Zealand and South Korea.

What made the difference?

The countries that more efficiently managed this first outbreak and its consequences capitalized on their public health preparation to get a grip on the infection quickly. Germany has a high volume of infections but low mortality. The country only knows this because it had tested extensively – at a rate of 21 people per 1,000, as compared with 9.8 per 1,000 in the U.S.

New Zealand’s government proved willing to rapidly impose severe restrictions on movement and found the public largely supportive and ready to comply.

South Korea, while among the earliest countries affected, kept its mortality among the lowest in the world through widespread testing and deploying technology for widespread contact tracing. Infected individuals’ interactions were retraced using cellphone location data, surveillance camera footage and credit card records. Websites and apps offer details on infected people’s travel and exposure risks.

These approaches may prove hard for the U.S. to replicate. The country is far from having testing rates like Germany’s. New Zealand has a much less polarized citizenry and far more trust in its national leadership than the U.S. The South Korean technology-intensive approach to contact tracing would be considered too intrusive on individual privacy for the U.S.

Troubles for other nations, too

Italy initially underestimated the severity of its outbreak, but then imposed a strict lockdown with high citizen compliance and widespread testing and tracing. However, we found in our study that Italy is among the least prepared European Union members for a shift to a digital economy. Germany, New Zealand and South Korea all have higher levels of internet access and service, digital payments and public services, and employers ready to handle remote work.

Japan’s situation is particularly challenging because it eased up its restrictions too early and then had to impose an emergency to stem additional outbreaks. It is also relatively unprepared in digital terms because of a host of factors, ranging from peer pressure to come into the office, to security concerns, transactions that require a paper trail, often requiring official corporate seals, missing digital infrastructure and a continued aversion to digital payments.

Each of these countries is a wealthy, developed nation, so the differences are not due to affordability. Our research has found that preparedness requires not just funding but also farsighted, credible and transparent leadership and citizens’ trust in that leadership. The first leads to timely and firm decisions, and the second contributes to citizens’ willingness to cooperate with those decisions.

For instance, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s background as a trained scientist gave her powerful credibility when facing a scientific crisis. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern clearly explained her “go early, go hard” approach to lockdown restrictions, and her citizens agreed. In South Korea, authorities controlled the virus through “decisive and transparent leadership based on data, not emotion.”

As governments seek their own exit pathways, and aim to strengthen areas where they are weak, there’s no way to be completely certain or fully prepared for what might happen next.

In our research, we’ve found one principle that governments might find useful to guide them through the uncertainty. It’s from a former New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark: “Economies can recover; the dead can’t.”

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Bhaskar Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.