Creator of The Wire and native Baltimorean David Simon traveled to Sydney Australia to participated in the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. It was probably fortunate that he was halfway around the world; a revised version of his “impromptu” speech on solving the problem of American capitalism published in the Guardian is about as taboo as it gets.
He hits the ground running, stating definitively that there are two Americas: one “where there is a plausible future for the people born into it” and one where there isn’t. By paragraph three he has name-dropped Karl Marx, and just as quickly he cuts down Marxism as a positive program, which he says “devolve[s] into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that.”
What then does he propose to shrink the U.S. income gap? An unimaginable — at least in the current American ideological landscape — compromise between capital and labor, an “impure” system that lets neither side win every argument.
It’s an idea that certainly qualifies as “dangerous,” but Simon argues that it’s essentially what we had during America’s prosperous post-World-War-II years.
You can read the entire extract in the Guardian.
