GM is bankrupt, the government owns 60% and is actively involved, and the same government is also heading fast down the road of bankruptcy. What can we say about this?
In light of GM’s bankruptcy, Dan Neill offers these insights in this appropriately titled article When cars were America’s idols:
If you were to walk up to a typical New York executive in the 1960s — think Don Draper in AMC’s “Mad Men” — and tell him that General Motors Corp. would be in bankruptcy by 2009, he would have thought you were delusional, or perhaps a Communist. GM was more than just the world’s largest and most admired corporation; it was the final vindication of the American Way, the perfected and even divinely inspired example of democratic capitalism that stood opposed to the airless atheism and nullity of the Soviet system.
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If mighty GM can fail, cannot also the United States? And the answer is, absolutely. This is the lesson of GM’s bankruptcy, and it has little to do with market share and miles per gallon. It’s a rebuff of the notion of exceptionalism. Any organization that fails to sufficiently safeguard its means of self-correction and reform, that forsakes long-term investment for short-term gain, that piles up debt year after year, will eventually fail, no matter how grand its history or noble its purpose. If you don’t feel the tingle of national mortality in all this, you’re not paying attention.
(Shout out to BC for the tip)
What caught my attention about this article is the clear connection to American mortality. I don’t think that is overstating it. Do you?
Today we see all around us this same kind of short-term thinking. I would argue that one antidote to this is learning how to think generationally. I see the failure to do so is not only a failure of GM, but a failure of our cultural environment and the prevailing mentalities that guide our social discourse. I was not in the board meetings of course, but I know that public corporations are typically run with a predominant quarter-to-quarter concern, with the stock price being the main measure of success.
This leads to my main concern here about American mortality: Are today’s generation of leaders ready to sacrifice their wealth, political position, or present influence in order to preserve what we have for our children? And what can we the people do to call them to account, to urge them not to subscribe to the same short-term mentality any longer?
Thinking generationally is simple but profound. It involves seeing your own life as a link, a building block, a platform for the next generation and those that follow them. It can be a very powerful and sustainable self-motivation, rooted deeply in your love for your children.
Generational thinking also provides a winning organizational logic, though this can be harder to see. Business cycles and economic cycles make it clear that there are times of growing and contracting supply and demand. There are disruptions. There are bad actors. There are wars and rumors of wars. Careful planning and saving for the unforeseen but inevitable downturn can make all the difference. And the organizations (or nations) that do not will find themselves at a great competitive disadvantage. Think of the story of the ant and the grasshopper.
One powerful implication of thinking generationally is to see through our national obsessions with easy money, sex, fame, and self-esteem. While these things are often sold to us as freedoms or entitlements, generational thinking helps you see where and how they are actually constraints, keeping the heart and mind tied to the lesser goals of the moment. A media culture (politics included) consumed with the here-and-now simply baits the hook, making it easy for each of us to justify idolizing these things above sacrifice for the sanctity of future lives.
In Christian terms, if the idol of short-term thinking is the put off, I’d argue that the freedom of generational thinking is the put0n. For we know from Galatians 5:1-5 that for freedom Christ has set us free. (Note: If you like John Piper, see his message on this passage, where he asserts “Christ’s will for you is that you enjoy freedom. Where you go to school, what job you do, where you live, etc., are not nearly so crucial as whether you stand fast in freedom.”)
I want to be careful here. You may have heard similar arguments from Christians on “the religious right” who have said that America’s idols will be our undoing. In my cultural critique here, I am certainly not envisioning a return to the moral majority, at least not it’s all-too-often self-righteous style of communication about cultural issues. (I see the fruit of constraining, short-term idols all over that movement too. It seems to me to have been a product of an ideological generation (the Boomers) made for a medium (TV) that thrived in big, boisterous personalities.)
The freedom of generational thinking is to address present generational challenges without swinging too far into alternative extremes by looking ahead, past the present generational conflicts, to build solutions that last.
And that means admitting that the present cultural environment is still steeped in short-term thinking around the pursuit of fleeting idols. This crushes sustained thought and thoughtful disagreement among respected equals, which is heart of classic American liberalism, which so many have rightly died to create and preserve.
This classic liberalism also has deep roots in history through the idea of common law. You see this if you look closely at Pete Wehner’s comments contrasting common law with Judge Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy. He describes common law as “the notion that we rely on precedent and customs in order to determine what is just and fair. We do not look only to ourselves; we look to those who came before us.”
The point here is that when we discard classic liberalism, we discard the basis for common law and its traditions too. At our own peril. For classic liberalism aims to protect the truth from narrow dogmatism of any stripe. It can protect free speech because the lessons of history teach us that classic liberalism scrutinizes present decision-making, whereas liberalism’s dogmatic secularist counterpart is disguised as true liberalism but rejects the idea of truth. This is called “left-liberalism” in this crucial essay by Stanley Kurtz. Read it now if you are ready to take the blinders off and see the truth.
“Truth,” you say. “What is truth?” As soon as you say that, you lower your sights to the baser things of life. It is then all to easy to start bowing down to those vaporous idols thoughtlessly. We may think it freedom, but think it through. Are we not now on the path of a religious, dogmatic, strident liberalism? To what end?
Go against the grain, man. Why find out in the final analysis that we were sacrificing our children for our own present self-satisfaction? Do we think it won’t be clear then what we have been doing here?
Is it unpatriotic to say that this short-term obsessed part of American culture is really in need of dying, if we want to see the return of what is truly exceptional about America? Perhaps American exceptionalism only breeds oppression of the weak. But I am not ready to buy that argument. Let’s isolate the economic level. American exceptionalism is rooted in individual self-determination to pursue a dream within a secure system that rewards liberty, prudence, and risk-taking. Successes provide new jobs, new efficiencies, new tools. Punishing entrepreneurship in the name of punishing greed is at best misguided, at worst a political scheme of the worst kind.
Political grandstanding in the name of the oppressed will always find real targets in the halls of every American corporation. Greed and deceit exist in every human heart, rich or poor. They certainly show their face within organizations made of humans. But, thinking generationally is a check against our baser drives to demonize one group, in order to win the votes of another who is eager to find a grievance.
This can be a powerful lesson to all of us. If the leadership of GM were greedy and continually failed to think generationally about what they were building, then what can we really do to avert the consequences? Can we really play God and bail them out?
This is a lesson for all people in leadership. Surely there are many unfortunate employees whose retirements and future lifestyles will suffer greatly because of this, despite their hard work and the promises made to them, but as the leadership goes, so goes the organization. Our government can try to overturn what has been done, but the natural order may bite us back.
In using the term American mortality, the question to each of us should be: What are we still doing right now that could lead to the same fate as GM?
I really wonder if we do not see the same short-term obsession expressed in our government (by both parties!!) through the Bailouts and government intervention in the economy? Yes, strong central leadership is important. I am not saying to swing too far the other way and strip the federal government of too much power too fast. I do think a massive shift to the citizenry is in order, but that is for another post or hundred.
But for right now, we need to start by soberly asking ourselves what GM foreshadows? What do we expect will happen if our representatives in Washington continue to pursue short-term opportunities in this crisis–like winning the next election–rather than truly sacrificing present standards of living for our children’s stability and well-being?
Or we could just stick our collective heads in the sand.
Pardon my rant, but something has to give, my friend. And it will.
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PS: If you have been following my exploration of globalism, one point in the interest of clarity. For those who have a well-developed view of these trends, one could conceivable insert at this point the analysis that all these events are being guided by a master diabolical plan. I am not ready to go that far yet, but I am in multi-level analysis mode about this, whereas in the past I would not have entertained such theories.
Another reason I am looking closley into these theories is simply that true pluralism and effective social science (with the goal of effective communication) demands an objective look at global events within all interpretations on their own terms. For as the recent movie New World Order on the Independent Film Channel, and the raucous surrounding conversation, reveals (see what I mean), our anti-globalist friends certainly hold a strong worldview with powerful interpretive capabilities (and it should be known that they hold the Second Amendment firmly, too!).
My point in all this, is that for effective communication and not festering faction, we must see the equality of all our fellow citizens who demand a hearing. Suspending our own judgments and really listening is what I want as a citizen and Christian, and if we want this right we must always extend it fully to any other citizens, whether we disagree with them or not. For my Christian friends, this absolutely includes our LGBT friends, does it not? Don’t adopt the self-righteous style of communication of the moral majority. It becomes hard for us to hear you.
For this is classic liberalism, and it is handed off to us to protect as a generation. It is a sacred trust, along with our deepest held religious (or anti-religious) convictions. I comment on it at length here because it is essential to generational thinking. It is also essential to understanding me. All conflicts need not be addressed in our lifetime, so we should be very careful not to mortgage future generations in our vain attempts to do so, as if our generation is to be idolized by all future ones as the greatest.
word.
indeed