I started out find when and why the Democratic Party separated from unions. This is the tenth and final post in a series. Previous posts can be found at the following links.
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Much of what I’ve seen while trying to figure this out comes down to how bad we are at history.
“If there is one thing that both the Depression and the Great Recession taught us about how the economy works, it is that corporate power is a threat to public well-being—that it extracts its own rents. The economy’s only effective protection from that power is to be found in an activist federal government unafraid to deploy countervailing power and provide essential services in the form of public options and regulated utilities.”
Mike Konczal and Marshall Steinbaum in Democracy – A Journal of Ideas.
The Great Depression and the Great Recession, or either one, should have taught us that, but we are unteachable. What follows is a list of some of the more notable examples that came up while I was working through the question of unions. Some surprised me, some were just sorry reminders.
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The Great Depression generation knew the danger of allowing power to concentrate in the financial sector. The generation of the ‘60s had different experiences and bought into Libertarian economics that promoted that very danger. We watched as the financial sector “steadily gained power for 40 years,” leading to the Great Recession.
During the Great Recession, Republicans demanded austerity, ignoring the success of Keynesian economics in the Great Depression and in the Great Recession, the failure of austerity in Europe, and how “government spending for road-building, higher education, homeownership and a permanent war economy” had given us two decades [the ‘50s and ‘60s] “of growing prosperity.”
Republicans could demand austerity because, in 2010, voters gave power back to the very people who had sunk us just 2 years before. Is it any wonder that Republicans, now, are tearing away at the minimal protections that were put in place after the Great Recession? What cost would they expect to pay when it all goes South?
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Richard Nixon reached out to the white working class via his “southern strategy.” It wasn’t much of a stretch. “The majority of white working class voters [selected] Nixon by wide margins over the most pro-labor candidate [McGovern] ever produced by the American two-party system.” Ronald Reagan and both Bushies prospered from white working-class disillusionment with New Democrats. I’m not going to argue over how much was intransigent racism and much was persuadable; that’s another set of diaries. Either way, though, we couldn’t see Trump coming?
In 1980, Carter ran a negative campaign against Reagan. It contrasted badly with Reagan’s polished, optimistic message. Trump’s message was anything but polished, but he was talking up jobs while we were talking down Trump. Reagan crushed us again when Mondale and the party “offered voters almost nothing” on the economy, the “first Democratic nominee in many years to fail even to put forward a major jobs program.” So, what was our economic and jobs message in the last election?
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The Watergate-Baby Democrats believed Reagan when he proclaimed government to be the problem and gave him most of what he wanted. Neoliberals announced the death of big government as well as of liberal government. Both groups ignored how FDR and “Democrats broke the power of bankers over America’s great industrial commons” and protected democracy using “a raft of anti-monopoly, or pro-competition,” policies. They ignored the Emergency Banking Act, the 1933 Banking Act, Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the second New Deal, Victory in WWII, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, NATO, the historic prosperity of the late 1940s through the 1960s, the moon landing, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Using the press as a foil goes back, at least, to Goldwater. Given a simple, catchy slogan and no pushback, it has been paying dividends (false equivalencies) for decades.
Bill Clinton believed that he had lost his universal health-care battle “because his opponents went on television and defined his program,” again, with no pushback. Today, Republicans are on the air promoting their non-existent plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, their nominee for a stolen Supreme Court seat, and other right-wing policies.
In 1996, Bill Clinton joined with Republicans to revamp the welfare system. They used delayed implementation to push the consequences off for several years. It worked. Today, what are Republicans proposing in their push to repeal the Affordable Care Act? Delayed implementation.
Free-trade agreements have been put into place with no prescription for or solution to what they might do to jobs in this country, despite that having been an issue since the early ‘60s.
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We were surprised by “fake news” despite Fox, right-wing radio, and the George H.W. Bush campaign’s false stories and those of the George W. Bush campaign. Did no one think that unscrupulous campaign techniques might migrate to social media?
We talk about the divisiveness of “identity politics,” even though it was nothing more than a vestigial New Left of the ‘60s and was divisive enough then.
We talk about the racism of today’s Republican base as if Nixon’s southern strategy, Reagan’s pilgrimage to Philadelphia, Mississippi, and George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ads all had been about stamp collecting.
We are shocked when Trump appoints a cabinet designed to dismantle several departments, though Reagan had done that with the Department of Labor and the EPA.
We laugh when Trump “jawbones” manufactures into moving back largely imaginary jobs or creating already planned jobs. We laugh harder when we remember how John Kennedy did that to an entire industry and to real effect. Then we moan when we realize that this comparison is beyond the capacity of our media.
It’s all history. Righteous indignation and anger are appropriate. Surprise is not. These are Republicans.
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However, might we now be facing a larger and more consequential failure of history?
The industrial revolution changed everything, creating the greatest dislocation short of world wars. It created manufacturing jobs. Might the robotics revolution take them away? Are we on the verge of a jobs crisis that will dwarf anything we could imagine? Will anyone stop corporations from taking advantage of the labor glut as they now are in Europe, further repressing working men and women? Have we even considered the possibility, or what policies might be needed to protect main-street voters?
Should we be concerned about this or even monitor it? I don’t know. But I already can see us waiting for the Republicans to figure out how to spin the result to their advantage while siding with corporations.
History is not destiny, but it is not sterile, either. Some questions are worth asking.