Getting America Unstuck: The Politics of Character and Craftsmanship

America is stuck today because its challenges have outstripped our thinking. Getting America Unstuck takes this on. Steven Howard Johnson breaks fresh ground by redefining a series of key challenges, and by asking us to imagine what we’d be doing – as the American public – if we were really on top of our game.
We’d base our approach to politics on the sort of maturity our parents teach us – accept responsibility for our behaviors and the consequences they create. And we’d take that to scale. America is a nation with a cause-and-effect architecture, Steve reminds us. Only with a spirit of character and craftsmanship will the American people and their elected representatives bring out America’s best.
An America of good Character accepts responsibility for getting its cause-and-effect architecture working as well as possible. An America of Craftsmanship won’t settle for sloppy diagnoses; it makes a point of getting to the bottom of things. And it won’t settle for sloppy prescriptions; it insists on knowing how we might bring out our full potential.
There’s no joy in poor Character, no pride in weak Craftsmanship – only frustration and mutual recrimination. And perpetual Stuckness.
Getting America Unstuck is therefore a message book, a book of strongly-felt criticisms and a book of strongly-felt uplift. Steve has a knack for finding insights that have eluded others.
What’s missing in how we think about public schools? Too many reformers want to manage the grown-ups differently, he observes. But the nation’s best principals focus on the children and what it takes to engage every child and help every child succeed.
What’s missing in how we think about inequality? We don’t realize that capitalism comes in two flavors, Steve argues, Prosperity Capitalism and Enrichment Capitalism. FDR’s Rules gave America a thirty-five year postwar run of Prosperity Capitalism, in which average earnings for the Bottom 90% grew more than twice as fast as average earnings for the Top 1%.
Then Reagan changed the rules. Reagan’s Rules have produced three decades of Enrichment Capitalism, in which wage growth for those in the Bottom 90% has been flat-lined to enable an earnings increase of more than 200% for those in the Top One Percent.
Doesn’t globalization explain the flattening of America’s wages? No, Steve argues, even without globalization, Reagan’s Rules would have flattened the wages of working Americans and promoted explosive enrichment for those at the top. Think of globalization as this era’s cover story and we’ll be closer to the mark.
Shifting to climate, Steve raises the question of what’s missing in how we think about global warming. Environmentalists made a serious error, Steve argues, when they mischaracterized global warming as an “emissions” problem, implying that “slower emissions” would bring global warming to a halt.
They should have described it as an “overload problem.” The larger the atmosphere’s CO2 overload, the more intense the global harm. And they should have characterized the path forward as a Portfolio Replacement Path. Completely replace yesterday’s portfolio of high-risk fossil fuel technologies with tomorrow’s portfolio of climate-safe energy technologies.
Do that, and the overload stops growing. Do that, and global warming is halted.
There’s more, in this message book. Prosperity always brings Temptation, Steve reminds us, forcing us to make a vital moral choice. A corrupted capitalism or a responsible capitalism? “Temptation is eternal; Corruption is a choice.” And we’ve made the wrong choice.
In its Kindle early-release version, the graphs and charts of Getting America Unstuck won’t display on some Kindle devices as cleanly as readers will want. But the text of this book pushes boundaries that need to be pushed, and readers will appreciate Steve’s message on a number of our era’s most vital issues.