Why isn't capitalism working better? Has it been supplanted by slavery to technology?

Boiled down, two new books — “Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism,” by Yanis Varoufakis and “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present” by Fareed Zakaria — ask and seek to answer the same question: What went wrong?

As recently as the eve of the millennium, George H.W. Bush’s New World Order was a plausible roadmap to a global future in which Western economic and social freedoms would bring American-style opportunity and security not just to developing nations, but the old stalwarts of Russia and China and the Middle East, whose inept governments had for centuries held their people down.

Now it appears the tide has shifted, and instead of Russia, China, the Middle East and Africa becoming liberalized, illiberal forces within Western nations are eating away at our own freedoms and economies that, not so long ago, we assumed would save the world.

Since its creation, there have always been elements within America that abhorred capitalism, and certainly capitalism has weaknesses that are there for the exploiting. Traditionally, the anti-capitalists always failed, because in the grand scheme, capitalism worked too well for too many people.

But Varoufakis argues that capitalism in this century has been silently overturned, without our awareness, by feudal tech companies that have turned us into a nation of dutiful serfs.

Classic capitalism rewards the production of products and services with profit, but Big Tech often reaps massive rewards for doing nothing (what economists opaquely call “rents”) other than selling our personal information without our consent or even our awareness.

Federal and state governments filed suit against Apple for much the same reason — collecting an undue amount of the profit from the work of app developers. Beyond that, however happy Apple users might be with their devices, they couldn’t quit Apple if they wanted to. Their photos, music, passwords, documents and data are too matted within the Apple ecosystem to extract.

Even so, it is difficult to see how being shackled to the devices of our technological masters is so much different than being beholden to Mr. Peabody’s coal train and his company store. Through our history, what most of us think of as “economic freedom” allows us to switch jobs, which is little more than trading one overlord for another. We still, after all, need health insurance.

This is a deal we have always been willing to make, however implicitly. In “The Great Gatsby,” ​​Nick notes that “Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”

The serf, while of lower class than the peasant, can at least count on his lord for protection from marauding hordes or from computer viruses, and have a bit of reflected glory from their lords’ mesmerizing castle or iPhone. In that respect, there isn’t much difference between Apple and Donald Trump. Meanwhile, peasants have what, exactly?

At the end of every hard-earned day, writes philosopher Bruce Springsteen, people find some reason to believe. Yet the reasons keep disappearing. Religion is falling off a cliff; corporate loyalty is dead; families either splinter or race from one ultimately unfulfilling activity to the next, trying everything, mastering nothing.

When we find ourselves slavishly scrolling through social media or reflexively pulling out our credit card for the latest Trump-branded bauble, there are some other healthier pursuits we have missed.

“Western decadence” (i.e., materialistic excess and lack of a sober belief system) is the default cry of Eastern nations when putting down the West. Yet decadence is more accurately translated as freedom; that's why incompetent leaders such as Putin, Xi and Netanyahu so fear it. It’s why the Arab Spring died, why the fall of the Berlin Wall has come to stand for nothing, why Chinese communists slammed the door on the very economic advances they so crave.

Now, Zakaria writes, these illiberal forces have even come to our shores, as rapid advances in minority rights have triggered a gag reflex in nativists who have seen no comparable elevation in their own status. Thus, the very revolutions that cause change also seed an inevitable illiberal backlash. So, what’s the alternative?

With the advancement of modern machinery, slavery might have died a natural death had we just had the patience to wait another 40 years. Instead, a war killed 700,000 and fomented hatreds that live to this day. Yet how inhumane would it have been to clinically suggest that another four decades of human misery was just a cost of doing business? The Civil War left blood on the battlefield; doing nothing would have left blood on our souls.

Varoufakis and Zakaria identify legitimate flaws in our respective economic and political systems, yet we have this to fall back on: Ultimately, Americans do not do the wrong thing, they just do the right thing in the most difficult way possible.

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Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Traditional capitalism might be dead, authors suggest