These days, we hear a lot about privilege: white privilege, pretty privilege, skinny privilege. However, there is one actual class of privilege that exists in society that we all benefit from: the privilege of the present.
Privilege of the present is having the advantage of all the decisions and advancements that society has made up until this point. Have you ever wondered why every four (or even two) years we hear that this is the most important election of our lifetime? It’s because we’ve already reached this point in time despite all that has come before us—so yes, every election actually is the most important election of our lifetime, because it will help determine the future. Nothing you do today can change the past.
However, this is a privilege that has its limitations. Just because you are privileged to live in a world shaped by the past does not mean you understand how the past has shaped the present. This is why so many people look to tear down entire chunks of a system at once. If they see something that should be changed, they look past—or even ignore—all the good that the system has produced and try to reinvent it completely, despite the fact that it was this system—through mostly good—that got us to where we are today. Overhauling it entirely would have drastic effects.
The problem is that there are those who, through this limitation of ignoring history, actively seek to tear down institutions without considering the ramifications of their actions. And we see this limitation on both sides of the political aisle.
Let’s start with the obvious: far-left Democrats who are looking to uproot capitalism in favor of socialism. I’m not going to take up space here explaining why replacing capitalism with socialism is a bad idea, nor am I going to explain why services like trash collection and public schools are not examples of socialism. There are plenty of outlets and articles that do that already.
There are those who fight for socialism because they want to tear down society. I’m not talking about those people—because they’re correct that replacing capitalism with socialism would, in fact, tear down society. However, these people appeal to broader groups because they talk about fighting capitalism to correct issues like income inequality, student debt, and the general unaffordability of rent and groceries. And they’re right: Those are real problems (except for income inequality, but we’ll get to that later).
But they don’t realize that capitalism is not to blame for student debt. That’s the fault of government regulations that treat all college degrees as equal and require banks to give out loans without considering the differences between majors and earning potential.
Unaffordability of rent, especially in deep-blue cities, is the fault of rent stabilization and rent-controlled apartments, which incentivize people to stay in those situations longer. This, in turn, creates a supply-and-demand problem that eventually raises rents far beyond what they should be for apartments that aren’t stabilized. Rising prices of goods are due to the damage done to the dollar over decades of government overspending, skyrocketing national debt, and “free money” handouts whenever politicians want to buy votes. In other words, the problems blamed on capitalism often stem from messing with capitalism.
Income inequality is the result of successful people becoming more successful. But in that time, everyone—and I mean everyone—benefits. As the income gap widens, people at the bottom of the income spectrum are also getting wealthier—not at the same rate as those at the top, but certainly compared to where they were 10 or 20 years ago. This, too, is a result of capitalism. You are getting wealthier—not as wealthy as the ultra-rich, but wealthier than you would have been years ago.
The people who line up behind socialism never lived in a socialist society. They have no idea how much progress will stall, how much wages will fall, and how much less your dollar will buy under socialism—because they have the advantage of living in a world built by capitalism. Does capitalism have faults? Sure. But the answer is not to tear the system down entirely.
But the right side of the aisle has its own privileged present, and this stems from how Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pushing his agenda. Despite his promises not to touch vaccines, Kennedy has taken tremendous steps to undermine what he sees as America’s “unhealthy obsession” with them. He replaced the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices with people more skeptical of vaccines, changed recommendations for the MMRV shot, delayed the Hepatitis B vote until he could install his own people, and canceled funding for mRNA research.
And Republicans seem to be going along with whatever he’s doing. RFK Jr. has turned a large segment of the conservative movement into vaccine skeptics. That’s astonishing. Just a year ago, RFK Jr. was an Independent—and before that, a staunch Democrat. Yet people are so caught up in his whirlwind of action that they’re going along with his biased and unscientific view of medicine.
Why? Because for generations, we’ve lived in a world protected from countless diseases by vaccines. If you were born after 1979, you’ve never seen a case of polio. Unless you followed the NHL in 2014, you haven’t seen mumps either. Are there potential dangers to vaccines? Perhaps. We don’t yet fully know the long-term downsides of mRNA vaccines—which makes it all the more baffling that RFK Jr. cut the funding for that very research.
And yet, we sit here comfortably in the present, protected by vaccines for a century. But because of reactions to the global pandemic, conservatives are now looking to tear down the entire system—because they have no memory of a world without vaccines.
So, as we sit here today watching the health system get uprooted and dismantled, and as New York prepares to elect its second-ever socialist mayor (David Dinkins was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America—and we know how his one term turned out), remember what the present is like.
Because if the Left succeeds with socialism, and the Right succeeds in dismantling vaccines, the privilege of the present will soon become the good old days.
Izzo Zwiren is the former host of the Jewish Living Podcast. Follow him and his brothers on their health journey on their YouTube Channel, Brotherly Lovehandles. Izzo lives on Long Island with his wife and three adorable, hilarious children.
