Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America

From longtime "New York Times" columnist Bob Herbert comes a wrenching portrayal of ordinary Americans struggling for survival in a nation that has lost its way In his eighteen years as an opinion columnist for "The New York Times," Herbert championed the working poor and the middle class. After filing his last column in 2011, he set off on a journey across the country to report on Americans who were being left behind in an economy that has never fully recovered from the Great Recession. The portraits of those he encountered fuel his new book, "Losing Our Way." Herbert's combination of heartrending reporting and keen political analysis is the purest expression since the Occupy movement of the plight of the 99 percent. The individuals and families who are paying the price of America's bad choices in recent decades form the book's emotional center: an exhausted high school student in Brooklyn who works the overnight shift in a factory at minimum wage to help pay her family's rent; a twenty-four-year-old soldier from Peachtree City, Georgia, who loses both legs in a misguided, mismanaged, seemingly endless war; a young woman, only recently engaged, who suffers devastating injuries in a tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis; and a group of parents in Pittsburgh who courageously fight back against the politicians who decimated funding for their children's schools. Herbert reminds us of a time in America when unemployment was low, wages and profits were high, and the nation's wealth, by current standards, was distributed much more equitably. Today, the gap between the wealthy and everyone else has widened dramatically, the nation's physical plant is crumbling, and the inability to find decent work is a plague on a generation. Herbert traces where we went wrong and spotlights the drastic and dangerous shift of political power from ordinary Americans to the corporate and financial elite. Hope for America, he argues, lies in a concerted push to redress that political imbal

Author's Note

The moment came unexpectedly, which is how denial is often pierced. Guntars Lakis, an architect in Bridgeport, Connecticut, had been watching his small kids at soccer practice. They came running toward him when practice was over, sweating, giggling, and clamoring for Italian ices. That was when he realized how far he had fallen. In a lush, beautifully landscaped suburban park, on a late afternoon in summer, he felt ashamed. "They wanted an Italian ice after practice," he told me, "and I didn’t have four dollars in my wallet to buy it for them. I didn’t have any money at all."

The twenty-first century has not been kind to the middle class in America. The economic nightmare that descended on the Lakis family was part of an epic change in the lives of individuals and families across the country. Millions of hardworking men and women who had believed they were solidly anchored economically found themselves cast into a financial abyss, struggling with joblessness, home foreclosures, and personal bankruptcy. Some were astonished to find themselves turning to food banks and homeless shelters. The hard times would eventually spread like a blight across the country, wiping out savings, crushing home values, and upending carefully nurtured career plans. For much of the population, the very notion of economic security evaporated.

Spirits sank along with bank balances. The Great Recession and its dismal aftermath showed unmistakably that a great change had come over the country. The years that had been unkind to the middle class were positively brutal to the working class and the poor. The United States was no longer a place of widely shared prosperity and limitless optimism. It was a country that had lost its way. By 2012 the net worth of American families had fallen back to the levels of the early 1990s. Poverty was expanding, and the middle class had entered a protracted period of decline. Signs of distress were everywhere. There were not nearly enough jobs for all who wanted and needed to work. Middle-aged professionals were being forced into early, unwanted retirement. Low-wage, contingent work—without benefits and with no retirement security—was increasingly becoming the norm. Even young graduates with impressive credentials from world-class colleges and universities were finding it difficult to put together a decent standard of living. For millions of Americans, there was no work at all.

As I traveled the country doing research for this book, I couldn’t help but notice that something fundamental in the very character of the United States had shifted. There was a sense of powerlessness and resignation among ordinary people that I hadn’t been used to seeing. The country seemed demoralized. I remembered the United States as a far more confident and boisterous place in the days when I was growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1950s and ’60s. Kids, grown-ups, everybody had their dreams and were unabashedly flexing their muscles, ready to make them come true. The bigger the dream, the better. Each day was the dawn of new possibilities. All you needed was energy and a willingness to work hard.

That bold confidence in the future now seemed as old-fashioned as typewriters and telephone booths. There was still plenty to admire about the United States, and crowds could be heard from time to time chanting "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" at rallies and ball games. But what I was seeing in my travels was a deeply wounded society, with a majority of respondents in poll after poll saying the U.S. was in a state of decline. The symptoms were numerous, varied, and scary. The economy seemed to work only for the very wealthy. By 2013 the richest 1 percent in America was hauling in nearly a quarter of the nation’s entire annual income and owned 40 percent of its wealth. The bottom 80 percent of Americans, 250 million people, were struggling to hold on to just 7 percent of the nation’s wealth. No wonder people were demoralized.

The high rollers continued to thrive despite the recession and its widespread suffering. The head of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, was compensated to the tune of $13.2 million in 2010 as salaries and bonuses on Wall Street roared back from the economic debacle set in motion by the recklessness of those very same Wall Street bankers and their acolytes in government. By 2013 the stock markets were setting record highs, and banks that were once thought too big to fail were growing bigger still.

The incomes of the über-rich came to mind one winter morning as I was reading a desperate letter written by a woman in her mid-fifties to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The woman and her husband were unemployed and about to lose their home to foreclosure. "I pray to God," she wrote, "that we do not have to resort to living in the car which is unimaginable in the middle of January in zero degree temperatures with no gas money to run the engine to keep warm."

For ordinary Americans, the story of the past several years has too often been about job cuts, falling wages, vanishing pensions, and diminished expectations. Birthrates plummeted in the wake of the recession as couples put off having children for financial reasons. The lowest birthrates ever recorded in the U.S. were in 2011 and 2012. By then, nearly one in every four American children was poor. For black children, it was one in three. The decline in births came as studies were showing alarming increases in mortality rates for some segments of the population. From 1990 to 2008 the life expectancy for the poorest, least well-educated white Americans fell by a stunning four years. For white women without a high school diploma, it fell by five years.

One night, after I’d moderated a program on Afghanistan at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, a World War II veteran came up to me and asked plaintively, "What happened to us?" His tone and weathered face conveyed a sense of real loss. He’d known a different America, having worked as an engineer and raised a family in the Midwest in the post–World War II period when the United States showed every sign that it was really getting its act together, becoming in actual fact a more perfect union. As we talked, I thought back to that era, which in many ways was a golden time. By the mid-1960s the warm glow of success was spreading like the summer sun to most of the country. The first of the baby boomers had put aside their Davy Crockett hats and Mickey Mouse Club ears and were entering college. Television was moving from black and white to color. Unemployment was low, wages and profits were high, and the nation’s wealth, compared to today, was distributed in a much more equitable fashion.

America was on a roll during those Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson years. Economic, social, and cultural doors were being flung open one after another. There was a buoyancy to the American experience that was extraordinary.

The nation was far from perfect, and I would be the last person to suggest otherwise. There was plenty of conflict, small-mindedness, and bigotry. Vietnam would prove an unmitigated disaster. Blacks and women had to mobilize to fend off treatment that was hideously and often criminally unjust. But there was also an openness to new ideas and a willingness to extend a collective hand to those who were struggling. It was a time in which the Supreme Court struck down one racist statute after another; a time that gave us Medicare and Medicaid, the Peace Corps, and the space program. The middle class, America’s proudest creation, was thriving, and it was not yet a mortal sin for someone running for public office to mention the poor.

In those heady, sun-washed days, described by the writer Nelson Lichtenstein as "the high noon of American capitalism," everything embodied in the great promise of the United States—freedom, equality, opportunity, and widely shared prosperity—appeared to be coming to fruition. Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote of the mid-1960s that "steadily increasing affluence seemed an enduring and irreversible reality of American life." The Temptations of Motown, who helped power the era’s soundtrack, sang of momentary setbacks in love but felt compelled to add the sociological aside "There’s plenty of work and the bosses are paying."

Half a century later the plaintive question of the elderly World War II veteran hung in the air: "What happened?" How did this proud and triumphant nation, a dynamic and robust country that served as the economic and cultural model for much of the world, end up in such deep trouble, so deeply wounded? How did we reach a state of affairs in which the outlook had grown so dim? Why was there so much suffering in the United States—families crushed in the economic downturn, thousands upon thousands of GIs struggling with terrible physical and psychic wounds inflicted in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and millions of children whose futures were being foreclosed by poverty and shrinking opportunities?

The most direct answer to the veteran’s question was that as a society we had behaved irresponsibly, self-destructively, for decades. We lost sight of the effort and sacrifice required to build and maintain a great nation. We refused to fend off the destructive excesses of free-market zealots and casino capitalists. Greed was not only tolerated but encouraged, and that led to catastrophic imbalances in wealth, income, and political power. Over time the great American ideals of fairness and justice for all, and the great American values of thrift and civic engagement, began to lose their hold on us. We embraced shopping. We behaved as if the acquisition of material goods, from sneakers and gold chains to vast seaside estates, was the greatest good of all.

The devastating wounds that have caused Americans such pain were self-inflicted. We fought wars that should never have been fought. We allowed giant banks and predatory corporations to plunder the nation’s wealth and resources without regard for the damage done to the economy, the environment, or the people. We neglected the nation’s physical infrastructure to the point where bridges were collapsing, water systems were failing, and the historic city of New Orleans was submerged in a catastrophic flood that shocked not just the nation but the world.

After so much neglect and so many bad policy decisions, we ended up with a government and an economy incapable of meeting the human needs of a complex and diverse nation of more than 300 million people.

The abiding premise of this book is that things do not have to be this way. There is no reason to sit still for an intolerable status quo. Democracy is still alive, if not particularly healthy, in America. Ordinary citizens can still roll up their sleeves and—with enough effort, commitment, and willingness to sacrifice—reclaim their nation’s lost promise. The dream can still be revived. Wounds can heal. A fresh start can be made. But only if citizens overcome their reluctance to engage in collective civic action on an organized and sustained basis. In other words, only if ordinary citizens choose to intervene aggressively and courageously in their own fate.

My goal in this book is to get beyond the din of clueless politicians and nonstop talking heads and show what really happened, how we got into such a deep fix, and how we can get out of it. Like a print in an old-fashioned darkroom, a clearer portrait of America will emerge. We’ll see the great challenges facing the nation from the perspective of the ordinary individuals and families who are directly affected by them: a young army captain who was badly wounded in Afghanistan, a woman who was driving across the Interstate 35 bridge in Minneapolis when it collapsed into the Mississippi River, young people trying to cope with staggering amounts of student debt in the worst economic environment since the Great Depression. I’ve focused most intently on four specific areas: the employment crisis, which was badly underestimated and poorly understood; the need to rebuild and modernize the nation’s infrastructure and the relationship of that vast project to employment; the critical task of revitalizing the public schools in a way that meets the profound educational imperatives of the twenty-first century; and the essential obligation that we have as rational and civilized beings to stop fighting pointless and profoundly debilitating wars.

There will be subtexts that weave their way through these interrelated themes, especially the poisonous effects of wealth and income inequality. And I’ll trace the relevant history that brought us to the present troubled moment. But there won’t be any suggestion that there are neat and tidy solutions to the crises facing America. We don’t need another ten- or twelve-point plan. There are good ideas all over the place, even great ideas. But none of them have a prayer of working if the citizenry is not somehow aroused to reclaim America from the powerful moneyed interests—the "malefactors of great wealth," as Teddy Roosevelt so memorably called them—who have been the ones most responsible for driving the nation into such a wretched state of affairs. The historian Howard Zinn once told me, "If there is going to be change, real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That’s how change happens."

All of the great movements in America—from abolition and civil rights, to the labor and women’s movements and the fight for gay rights—all were led by citizens fed up with an intolerable status quo. That is how societies change. That is how America can, should, and—with the proper commitment and cooperative spirit—will change.
1. Falling Apart

I am not going to die today.
—Mercedes Gorden

Mercedes Gorden glanced out at the highway, which she could see from her ­third-­floor office on the sprawling campus of the Best Buy corporate headquarters in Richfield, Minnesota. It was after five, rush hour, but the traffic wasn’t too bad. She didn’t really care. She’d recently been promoted by her company, Accenture, which did employee relations work for Best Buy, and her raise had kicked in that day.

“I wasn’t in any hurry,” she would later recall. “I was in a great mood. I thought about picking up a bottle of wine on my way home and maybe celebrating my raise with my fiancé. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the day.”

Nothing at all. August 1, 2007. Newspapers were reporting that the Italian movie director Michelangelo Antonioni had died. Presidential candidate Barack Obama, a long shot for the Democratic nomination, was meeting in Washington with members of the 9/11 Commission. A pair of senators, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, had scheduled a press conference to discuss the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure, but few reporters were interested, and the press conference was a bust.

It was around 5:30 when Mercedes collected her keys, smiled at a couple of ­co-­workers who teased her about her promotion, and headed for the parking garage.

Mercedes was ­thirty-­one years old, ­dark-­haired, athletic, and known for her quick smile and contagious laugh. She had a gift for making friends easily. She loved to dance and was in love with Jake Rudh, who was trying...