The American dream of living a comfortable life with own home, late model car, secure job and guaranteed retirement income from pension and social security is becoming elusive because of several major social and political changes over the last few decades. First on my list is the breakdown of the family-living concept and high divorce rate among married couples (now approaching 50 per cent) which resulted in financial and emotional insecurities among aging women, not to mention the problems faced by children coming from broken families. With more emphasis of companies on their bottom lines, pensions have gradually disappeared except for certain government and unionized jobs.

Health insurance plans provided by employers have been getting more expensive with steep increases in the deductibles. Job security itself is gone with companies preoccupied with down-sizing. Social security income has become hopelessly inadequate. The economy has been devastated by a series of misguided government policies. It started with NAFTA which resulted in loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs and factory shutdowns rendering not just direct labourers but a huge number of skilled workers unemployed. Initially, the companies fled to Mexico but once they got the taste of mega profits resulting from lower labour costs, the new destinations were China and other Asian countries.

During the late 1990s rising stock markets, especially in the tech sector, and lure of easy money by trading on the internet caused mass hysteria of get-richquick schemes. People quit secure regular jobs to become day-traders even if they had no clear idea about these companies! Then came the dot.com bust whereby thousands of people lost all their assets and literally went broke overnight. Almost a similar scenario played out in the real estate market in the post 9/11 era of low mortgage interest rates and lax oversight of the lending process. The idea of buying a home with very little or no down payment and then “flipping” it a few months later to make a hefty profit became the new addiction.

The great recession of 2008- 2009 and the collapse of the housing market brought an end to all that sending thousands of people to tent cities. Most new job creations in recent years have been hourly jobs or jobs at lower levels. Most families are making ends meet by both spouses working and/or working multiple jobs. Many hourly jobs are also part-time jobs. Employers are clever enough to limit working hours so that they pay no or minimal fringe benefits like health insurance and paid vacation. It is also not a surprise that homelessness is on the rise. The problem is no longer restricted to business districts of large cities but has permeated into beautiful suburban areas creating a nuisance for residents.

In the past, retired people could count on their grown-up children for help with housing and other expenses. Now the younger generation is unable to afford their own housing and in many cases moving back to live with aging parents. The worst of all developments is the addiction of the younger generation to opioid pills which is causing a huge emotional/financial drain on parents and making children averse to higher education and hard work, not to mention rising deaths from overdose. This is not a Democrats versus Republicans issue. The downturn in the economy started during the Carter presidency. Although Ronald Reagan’s “Reaganomics” is credited for reviving the economy, it also started the era of lax business regulations which allowed corporations to put their emphasis on profit above everything else.

The NAFTA and dot.com bust happened during the Clinton administration while the real estate collapse was the grand finale resulting from poor oversight of financial institutions of the Bush era. Obama promoted a more liberal agenda, geared more towards the lowincome population and achieved an anemic growth in economy. Trump is implementing a series of plans including bringing back jobs to USA, building the wall along the Southern border, massive tax cuts, fighting the opioid crisis etc., in order to “make America great again”. I am afraid that his efforts are too little too late. Even if there are jobs there are not enough qualified candidates. School curricula have been diluted over the years to a point that qualified candidates are hard to find. Influx of immigrants, both legal and illegal, in order to fill the vacancies are causing other social problems.

The salaries are not adequate to have a decent lifestyle. The root cause is greed: not just the greed of politicians and corporations but of the general population as well. It seems that no matter which party is in power the leaders introduce policies benefiting their constituencies and the followers rush to take full advantage of all the loopholes in the system. The younger generation does not see a future and a career path through traditional corporate, academic or government jobs. They are also fed up with the corruption and hypocrisies in both parties. They are inherently liberalminded because of their youthful passion and enthusiasm to do something good for mankind.

The three mantras of a socialistic view are universal healthcare, free college education and open borders. They do not see themselves as “nationalists”, but more as members of some utopian global community. They are losing faith in capitalism. It is only natural that they would want to embrace an ideology which puts power directly in the hands of people. The Democratic party is gradually becoming more liberal embracing a more radical socialistic view. Bernie Sanders who presents himself as a socialist inspired millions of young people during the 2016 primaries. The stunning victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) for a New York house seat is a key omen for the future. It is not just the Democratic party; legalisation of gay marriages, smoking of marijuana, wide-spread political correctness etc. indicate a shift of the entire country to the left.

Of course, older people who accumulated wealth through traditional avenues are not going to give up easily. However, the fact is that they are old and not going to live forever. Even the children in many millionaire families are becoming liberal political activists! Most conservatives laugh off the idea of socialism by pointing to what happened in Venezuela. However, there are examples of successful countries with socialistic policies such as Sweden, Canada and Yugoslavia. It is highly unlikely that USA will ever become a truly socialist nation where public entities instead of private corporations make all commercial decisions; after all this is the country where new product and process innovations and resulting job creating industries are born every day.

However, democratic socialism in some form does not seem to be out of the question anymore. I believe that two Bengalis might play key roles in initiating this social transformation coming from totally different angles. Abhijit Banerjee won the Nobel prize in economics this year. He reportedly used statistical models similar to what is used in medical research (where a new medicine is tried on two different groups – the “control” group and the “experimental” group – for evaluating the effectiveness of a new medicine) to find out what tools (policies, programmes, incentives) are more effective in reducing poverty. Thanks to the Nobel prize, his work would draw attention to various ways of improving living conditions of poor people and inspire more research which might bring fundamental changes in the basic economic principles necessary for more equitable wealth distribution.

Saikat Chakrabarty, the other Bengali, was the person behind AOC’s rise to fame, both intellectually and financially. A rather young guy, who made his money in Silicon Valley, he appears to be not only a true believer in socialism but has the necessary vision and intelligence to make a transformation to socialism happen. The so-called “Green New Deal” (GND) proposed by AOC, which has now been embraced by every democratic candidate for presidency in 2020 in one form or another, was reportedly the brainchild of Mr. Chakrabarty. He has explicitly said that GND is about a major economic overhaul and not climate change. He left AOC’s team in August to run the group “New Concensus” whose charter is promoting GND.

We, the Bengalis, have been taught from our childhood that accumulating too much wealth is bad. The core message was delivered by Paramhansa Ramkrishna who said “taka mati, mati taka” (money is dirt, dirt is money). All the heroes we worshipped and emulated were in favour of sacrifice and social justice. Socialism is ingrained in our head. It is no wonder that Bengalis are overwhelmingly Democrats in the political arena of America. It would be fitting if now the Bengalis come to the forefront and practice what they preach in order to make major radical changes in the USA.

(The writer, a physicist who worked in academia and industry, is a Bengali settled in America)