When the center fails to hold, we won't like what comes next

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

-- W.B. YEATS, "The Second Coming"

Can the centre hold?

Yeats had it right, and it's beginning to look as if Mencken did too.

As far back as there has been a country, Americans have understood that in a republic, what is good for the most people is generally what works best for the nation as a whole. It didn't always work that way. Until the 20th century, Americans lived under a fairly rigid if unofficial class system.

Unless someone was fortunate enough to invent something or lucky enough to find precious minerals, the chance of a working-class person to become rich was about as likely as the Horatio Alger stories being true.

Two things happened that changed our society, both of them during World War I. One was the income tax and the other was the estate tax, both of them worked to reduce the strength of what was essentially an American aristocracy.

From then up until about 1980, we built one of the most egalitarian societies the world has ever known, and at a fairly high level. Through the 50s and most of the 60s as well, it was possible for a man without much of an education to get a good enough job to own a home, raise a family and live a reasonably middle-class lifestyle.

But just as Ronald Reagan once said that freedom is never more than one generation away from being threatened, the same is true of an egalitarian society. The mega-wealthy, America's "aristocrats," never stop battling for ways to reduce the amount of their money that goes to the government.

Less than 35 years later, our country has changed fundamentally. Mencken said that ignorance and greed would ultimately bring our republic down, and even if it isn't the same people who are ignorant and greedy, they're all over the place these days.

Maybe the best way to look at it is that the ignorant are allowing the greedy to steal from the rest of us.

We allow a family with $140 billion net wealth to continue growing their fortune by keeping their workers in poverty.

We allow two brothers with more than $80 billion between them essentially to buy entire state governments to further their own interests.

The center won't hold much longer.

And when it finally does not hold, when everything put together falls apart, we may have the answer to Yeats' question in "The Second Coming."

"What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"