Who’s Upstream Now, Bitches?
/By Don Varyu
Jul 2025
n our deeply divided America, we only agree on one thing: we are broken. People on the right point the finger of blame at the left. People on the left point their fingers directly at Donald Trump.
But Trump did not cause our problem. He is only the perfectly depraved symbol of it. Millions of us may quietly muse about the day when he is gone. But we won’t magically “snap back to normal”. The problem will remain.
And we can’t hope to solve that problem unless we properly understand it.
n 2012, a book titled, “Why Nations Fail” won a Pulitzer Prize in economics. Its thesis was pretty simple. Countries that succeed allow the wide distribution of opportunity and prosperity among its citizens. Those that falter direct wealth and opportunity to a very narrow sliver of very rich people at the top. The authors’ convincing series of historical examples span wide swaths of time and geography…and they make their argument almost irrefutable.
oday, it is common to refer to some entity or force as being “upstream” of something else. In other words, it’s what precedes. It helps direct and form whatever follows. A simple example: a toddler needs to learn to count before she can add or subtract. Counting is upstream.
The book’s authors point out that all nations develop both political and economic systems. But the ordering of these two is fixed: “…it is politics, and political institutions, that determine what economic institutions a country has.”
America prospered because democracy granted its citizens the vote—a means of electing and removing their leaders. That distribution of power also enabled a reasonable chance for Americans to build wealth.
At one time, Great Britain’s “empire” was the mightiest political force on Earth. And yet, America resoundingly passed it to become the world’s leading economic power.
The reason was a central difference in social structure between the two. A telling example is illustrated by the granting of patents. In England, patents (not just for inventions, but for entire industries) were granted at the favor of the king. His patents made already wealthy friends even richer.
In contrast, in America, Thomas Edison (the last of seven children from a struggling family) would eventually be granted more than 1,000 separate patents by his government. Here, merit trumped monarchy. It was how the two systems were dissimilar that determined different outcomes.
But now? My contention is that the essential difficulty of America at this moment is the collapse of common opportunity in favor of history’s far more prevalent legacy of iron rule.
Our essential structure has flipped. Money is now decidedly upstream from government.
That may seem obvious; after all, the evidence is all around us.
But I don’t think it’s that simple. I want to toss a couple of other factors into the water.
t’s hard today to imagine the blast that Thomas Jefferson ignited with his Declaration of Independence. From its opening words, “We, the people…”, through his phrasing, “…of the people, by the people and for the people…”, Jefferson sent shock waves across the developed world. European monarchies at first were offended; then they quaked. You could imagine their reaction like this: “The audacity! To think that mere commoners should be in control!” And then, in private conversation, “what if this thing ever takes hold here?”
Most continental nations tried to avoid that thought. But France suddenly realized it was too late. Their revolution erupted in 1789.
In that same year, the Founding Fathers finished the nuts-and-bolts work of turning Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric into an instruction manual. They built a constitution that contained flaws and compromises that still haunt us today. But among their successes was laying out a path that would make America the world’s dominant economy. The same mechanism that had allowed Edison to imagine and invent and prosper…also established a central currency, competitive banking and property laws. This apparatus served entrepreneurs, investors and citizens.
It also built guiderails that exposed even the very richest to the rule of law. In 1998, Bill Gates was the world’s richest man. But that didn’t prevent Microsoft from losing an anti-monopoly case to the federal government. The system was working.
It worked because upstream of everything were elements of ethics and integrity and fair play that citizens agreed to and followed. Yes, there would always be some trying to game the system. But our general sense of social morality held firm.
We believed in the way things should be ordered…and our beliefs held.
he other factor I’ll add to the mix is culture. In particular, the nature of our society in how Americans related to each other.
The first European settlers logically brought with them many of the trappings from their former hometowns in England. But they found themselves operating in a very different and unsettled world. They had to adapt to the unknown…with vast surroundings that were wild, mysterious and usually dangerous. There was no time for afternoon tea. There was no local branch of the royal court back home to serve or protect them from daily challenges. America developed a culture where people were required to depend on each other—and respect each other. We didn’t have any choice. No barn was raised by one man.
But eventually, culture would be watered down by the impacts of government and economics. It fell to the bottom—the last stop in the stream.
ell, by now I can almost hear you muttering, “Fine—but what’s the point of all this?!”
Well, my short take is this. Today, the ordering of these main elements—politics, economics, morality and culture--have been structurally reordered. And not for the better. The system that preserved us and bonded us…the one that lasted over two centuries…today is perverted.
If you were to visually depict America’s traditional “stream”, here’s how it had always flowed:
But here’s the power structure that exists now—the root of our problems:
The central force that defines us is minding to the accumulation of the greatest possible wealth by the smallest number of people. From the Oval Office to Wall Street to the commentators on CNBC, this is our obsession. Our national heroes include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Jeff Zuckerberg. Their ethic is singular: money is power, and power is money. People who don’t agree don’t matter.
Next, because the most influential elements of culture are also controlled by this same handful of people (e.g., social media, AI, “Real Housewives’”), culture has soared in both prominence and influence. If that doesn’t seem to ring quite true, think about how “cultural issues” animate both the MAGAs and the far left. Modern “culture” is corrosive; it has helped break America by turning us from a nation of “we” to a hundred million atomized “me”. Culture divides us.
The influence of politics melts away every day. Politics is now downstream from both Economy and Culture. Big money has purchased politicians and justices alike, to the point where money does whatever it wants. The protestors yelled, “No Kings!” But we already have one.
Finally, at the bottom of this polluted stream lie the remains of honesty and ethics. The things we once prized most are now targets of mockery. The cheat code to making it in America today is corruption. Only fools think otherwise.
We are now one of those failing nations.
he authors of How Nations Fail say history has one consistent answer on how to combat this: revolution. And peaceful ones work much better than violent ones. (In the end, Les Misérables stayed miserable.)
Mass protests are necessary and helpful. But protest also has to come from other quarters. First of all, from responsible media. Journalism once prided itself on “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” How quaint. Journalism now seems obsessed with running away from potential Trump lawsuits. It’s time for journalism to stand up.
Ironically, this is also true for trembling corporate boards. Those companies can profit from their public protests. What would happen to a consumer goods company wiling to say, “these tariffs are wrong—they’re killing us, and they’ll mean higher prices for our customers”. More customers would flock to them. In a country where roughly two-thirds of all people now oppose most of Trump’s signature policies, which companies dare to speak the obvious truth?
began by asserting that Trump is the symbol of the problem, not the problem itself. The poisonous rejiggering of our society--from “what you are” to “what you make”--began in earnest back in the 1980’s. For the plutocrats and the religious whack jobs and the war mongers, Ronald Reagan was a very useful idiot. They told him what to say and do…and he obeyed. For them, Clinton and Obama were just unfortunate interruptions. Their throughline was working tirelessly to rewrite tax laws, abolish regulations that curbed them, insert “God” into all levels of government, buy big media, buy off Congress and the courts to the degree that they would grant our President immunity from all prosecution—in effect, to crown a king.
Which is all to say that even when Trump finally walks off the stage, our stage will still be littered with piles of stinking garbage.
o clean it all up will take an incalculable amount of time, and perpetual effort.
If Democrats are to be the change agents, they need to drastically narrow their focus.
Yes, there are thousands of fixes needed. But they all point to one solution. We must remove wealth and greed from the headwaters of our society—even if that means driving away some rich donors. We must clearly and ceaselessly demand a return to the primacy of the same ethics and integrity that formed our country in the first place. This is what can cleanse us.
What once made us great…can make us great again.
“We…the people…”
