New York Times (Opinion)
By Thomas Friedman
February 17, 2016
I
find this election bizarre for many reasons but none more than this: If
I were given a blank sheet of paper and told to write down America’s
three greatest sources of
strength, they would be “a culture of entrepreneurship,” “an ethic of
pluralism” and the “quality of our governing institutions.” And yet I
look at the campaign so far and I hear leading candidates trashing all
of them.
Donald
Trump is running against pluralism. Bernie Sanders shows zero interest
in entrepreneurship and says the Wall Street banks that provide capital
to risk-takers are
involved in “fraud,” and Ted Cruz speaks of our government in the same
way as the anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, who says we should shrink
government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown
it in the bathtub.” (Am I a bad person if I
hope that when Norquist slips in that bathtub and has to call 911, no
one answers?)
I
don’t remember an election when the pillars of America’s strength were
so under attack — and winning applause, often from young people!
Trump’s
famous hat says “Make America great again.” You can’t do that if your
message to Hispanics and Muslims is: Get out or stay away. We have an
immigration problem.
It’s an outrage that we can’t control our border, but both parties have
been complicit — Democrats because they saw new voters coming across
and Republicans because they saw cheap labor coming across. But we can
fix the border without turning every Hispanic
into a rapist or Muslim into a terrorist.
Trump
seized on immigration as an emotional wedge to rally his base against
“the other” and to blame “the other” for lost jobs, even though more
jobs, particularly low-skilled
jobs, are lost to microchips, not Mexicans.
What
we have in America is so amazing — a pluralistic society with
pluralism. Syria and Iraq are pluralistic societies without pluralism.
They can only be governed by
an iron fist.
Just
to remind again: We have twice elected a black man whose grandfather
was a Muslim and who defeated a woman to run against a Mormon! Who does
that? That is such a
source of strength, such a magnet for the best talent in the world. Yet
Trump, starting with his “birther” crusade, has sought to undermine
that uniqueness rather than celebrate it.
Sanders
seems to me like someone with a good soul, and he is right that Wall
Street excesses helped tank the economy in 2008. But thanks to the
Dodd-Frank Wall Street
Reform and Consumer Protection Act, that can’t easily happen again.
I’d
take Sanders more seriously if he would stop bleating about breaking up
the big banks and instead breathed life into what really matters for
jobs: nurturing more entrepreneurs
and starter-uppers. I never hear Sanders talk about where employees
come from. They come from employers — risk-takers, people ready to take a
second mortgage to start a business. If you want more employees, you
need more employers, not just government stimulus.
I
have just the plan for him: The 2015 “Milstein Commission on
Entrepreneurship and Middle-Class Jobs” report produced by the
University of Virginia, which notes: “The
identity of America is intrinsically entrepreneurial [enshrined] by the
founders, popularized by Horatio Alger, embodied by Henry Ford. … With
enough hard work anyone can use entrepreneurship to pave their own way
to prosperity and strengthen their communities
by creating jobs and growing their local economy.”
The
report outlines many steps government can take — from deregulation to
education to finance — to unlock more entrepreneurship in America, and
not just in Silicon Valley,
but anywhere, like Louisville, where “a vibrant start-up community has
developed. … Today, the city boasts five accelerators, a vibrant angel
investor community and partnerships with large companies to support
start-up enterprises like the GE FirstBuild center,
which brings together micro-manufacturing and the maker movement.” We
can do this! We are doing it. “Roughly half of private-sector employees
work in small businesses, and 65 percent of new jobs created since 1995
have come from small enterprises.”
Unlike
Sanders, Ted Cruz does not have a good soul. He brims with hate, and
his trashing of Washington, D.C., is despicable. I can’t defend every
government regulation.
But I know this: As the world gets faster and more interdependent, the
quality of your governing institutions will matter more than ever, and
ours are still pretty good. I wonder how much the average Russian would
pay to have our F.B.I. or Justice Department
for a day, or how much a Chinese city dweller would pay for a day of
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or Environmental Protection
Agency? Cruz wraps himself in an American flag and spits on all the
institutions that it represents.
America
didn’t become the richest country in the world by practicing socialism,
or the strongest country by denigrating its governing institutions, or
the most talent-filled
country by stoking fear of immigrants. It got here via the motto “E
Pluribus Unum” — Out of Many, One.
Our
forefathers so cherished that motto they didn’t put it on a hat. They
put it on coins and then on the dollar bill. For a guy with so many of
those, Trump should have
noticed by now.
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