In the middle of the last century, the U.S. “looked like a country of big, powerful institutions that had more or less made peace with one another,” writes Nicholas Lemann. He’s referring to the social contract formed post-World War II by major corporations, unions and the federal government. Although this deal benefitted some groups more than others, the result was a general increase in prosperity and enlargement of the middle class. The rich were still rich, but the gross disparity of earlier times (and nowadays) was eliminated.
In Transaction Man, Lemann expresses nostalgia for the mid-century ideal through the stories of Chicago families, black and white, who rose (to different levels) and fell (some harder than others) when the rules changed. The financial sector, drunk with liquidity and visions of a boundless world economy, captured the imagination of politicians in both parties (and elsewhere) along with pundits, philanthropists and academics. Stockholders ruled, and they demanded quarterly returns, not long-term thinking (much less any idea of the common good).
“This has generated enormous alienation and anger that has made itself felt in politics and elsewhere,” The New Yorker writer and Columbia University journalism professor comments. His observation is supported by the success of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, whose antipathetic followers share resentments over the economy but apportion the blame differently.
What about the techno-utopianism that oozed like artificial sweetener out of Silicon Valley? Has the web brought us together? The “rebellion” of some of tech’s entitled leaders has disrupted millions of lives and not always in the good ways they imagined. Those high-tech dreams, “if they came true, would mean, for most people, fewer conventional jobs, less economic security, less privacy and a faster pace of change,” Lemann writes. Sound good?
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Transaction Man chronicles a century of bad ideas, their proponents sharing the grandiosity of conviction that only their system is best. Lemann’s is among the most readable, most humane analysis of the situation in which we find ourselves. And in the end of his sad history of malicious and misguided ideas, he condemns the atomization of individuals who find themselves more or less alone, without supportive institutions. Can the frayed connections be restored?
