For the past 12 years here, I've been trying to provide long-term perspectives on current events. During that time the great crisis in American life and world affairs has deepened. This paradoxically makes it harder to stick to a long term perspective, since one so easily becomes absorbed by the news of the day. But I am going to try to do so, partly by trying to post about the Trump Administration only once every two weeks. And today's post will involve a glimpse into the past and into the future, rather than a look at today's headlines.
It also involves the third-rail comparison between Trump and the current Republican Party on the one hand, and Hitler and the Nazis on the other. But I am not going to suggest that Trump plans to do away with our civil liberties, put millions of Americans into camps, or commit mass murder, or that he is going to unleash a major war, even though I regard that as slightly more possible. Instead the comparison will focus on one very important similarity between Trump and Hitler. Both have gotten into power largely by protesting against the impact of economic change. And my comparison goes to the question of whether Trump has any chance of actually restoring the economy that has slipped away over the last half century. As it happens, Hitler and the Nazis also promised to do that--but in practice, they did the opposite.
My text today is a remarkable book from the late 1960s, Hitler's Social Revolution, by a very fine historian, now retired, David Schoenbaum. Schoenbaum taught for decades at the University of Iowa and wrote at least three different works of modern German history, each concerned with a different era, as well as a study of US-Israeli relations. His place within the department has now been taken by a scholar specializing in gender and sexuality issues in modern Germany--a very typical change in today's history departments.
Germany in the interwar period was very different from the United States during the last two or three decades, but both societies included large groups suffering from the impact of economic change. In Germany, these included farmers hurt by low prices and international competition and a large new white collar class of clerks and retailers who often lived on proletarian incomes. By 1930, the year of the first big Nazi electoral success, Schoenbaum argued that the Nazi core was brought together by various fears: "fer of the department store, frear of communism, fear of the Poles, fear of further decline in the price of farm commodities, and 'the politics of cultural despair' [a reference to far right opposition to the modern world in general.] As I write this piece, I am increasingly troubled that no contemporary academic, to my knowledge, has produced a comparable breakdown of who is behind Trump, and why. But surely many of his voters were motivated by fear of further job losses, fear of immigrants, fear of Islam, and fear and hatred of political correctness. There is, by the way, one critical and somewhat encouraging difference between Nazi followers and voters and Trump's. The Nazis were disproportionately young; Trump supporters are disproportionately old.
Both coalitions were in part protesting long-term economic and cultural changes. In the German case these changes included the growth of great retail chains like department stores, the development of world agricultural markets, and the disruption of currencies caused, ultimately, by the First World War. The contemporary United States is at a completely different stage of development. Our small farmers and small shopkeepers ceased to be a political force decades ago, the working class has been devastated by foreign competition, outsourcing, and automation, and service workers, not office workers, are the fastest growing part of our economy. In addition, although both 1930s Nazis and today's Republicans rail against minorities, the immigrant presence in today's United States is much, much larger than the minority population of Germany in 1933. As a matter of fact, successive German governments had used high tariffs to insulate Germany from some of the impact of globalization for more than 50 years by the time Hitler took power, and the Nazis went even further in that direction by trying to create an autarchic German economy. The United States on the other hand has been moving towards freer and freer trade for about 80 years now, and it is very unclear whether Donald Trump will actually be able to change the role of trade in our economy to any significant extent.
Hitler, like Trump, came to power promising to help all economic sectors of the nation, and especially to protect those who had been losing ground. The Nazis had also stood firmly for the preservation of the traditional status of women, who had been advancing into the professions at a rapid rate. But none of these promises, as Schoenbaum showed at great length, came true, even before the catastrophe of the Second World War. "In 1939," he wrote, "the cities were larger, not smaller; the concentration of capital greater than before; the rural population reduced, not increased; women not at the fireside but in the office and the factory; the inequality of income and property distribution more, not less, conspicuous; industry's share of the gross national product up and agriculture's down." Traditional elites remained in charge of major institutions. Schoenbaum might have added, as I found in my own research on that decade, that while the Nazis had ended unemployment, the whole population had continuously to deal with shortages of basic consumer goods and foodstuffs such as butter because of tight controls on foreign trade. This undoubtedly caused enormous frustration among the Nazis' original constituencies and indeed among the whole lower half of the population. They could however no longer express their dissatisfaction either at the polls or in print, since they lived in a police state, and the war gave everyone new and much bigger problems to worry about.
It is very likely, in my opinion, that Trump's followers will be similarly disappointed: that in four or eight years we will have fewer industrial workers, not more; that illegal immigrants will remain a huge presence in our economy and society, if indeed they have not been given some legal status; that the financial industry will be even more powerful than it was before; that health care will be harder to come by for ordinary Americans; and that the white proportion of our population will have continued to shrink. The question is whether the Trump Administration can keep dissatisfaction under control by continuing a daily propaganda campaign against its enemies in the media and the Democratic Party and by mobilizing resentment against political correctness and its political manifestations. It seems very likely to me that law enforcement will eventually by unleashed against demonstrators, but I do not foresee a police state. As in the case of National Socialism, those not belonging to our national community may face the biggest problems. There may indeed by large-scale deportations of immigrants, although in the long run I doubt very much that their presence will be substantially reversed.
Both the elevation of Hitler to the Chancellorship in 1933 and the election of Donald Trump represent tremendous failures of democracy in modern western nations. In both cases, a barely sufficient coalition of disaffected voters has put a dangerous man, leading a dangerous movement, in charge of a leading nation. While I continue to believe that our danger is the lesser of the two, it remains real enough. And Trump's inability to deliver on behalf of the men and women who elected him will only increase that danger.
Showing posts with label Republicans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Republicans. Show all posts
Thursday, March 02, 2017
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Where we stand
I am increasingly convinced that the fourth great crisis of American national life (after 1774-1794, 1861-68 or so, and 1929-45) began either on 9/11 or in November 2000 at the time of the contested election, and that it is limping towards its conclusion as Barack Obama moves through a disappointing second term. Events could change my mind. Another economic collapse or a foreign war could put us back into full crisis mode, although the latter, despite disquieting noises from China, seems unlikely. The crisis is in many ways a non-violent version of the civil war. The nation, divided largely on regional lines, has fought a bitter conflict over the role of the federal government and over values. Religion has played a larger role in this crisis than in any other in American history. This time we have not fought the conflict militarily, but rather through a ruthless use of our political institutions designed to mobilize both sides around common values. Because I have given small amounts of money to Democratic campaigns I get about three emails a day asking me for contributions to elections that are 17 months away, and I'm sure Republicans get parallel messages. This ensures that nothing like a consensus between the parties will emerge any time soon.
The Supreme Court played an enormous role in the post-civil war period, striking down civil rights legislation and the income tax, limiting the federal government's ability to protect the rights of freed slaves, and providing new legal protections for corporations under the 14th Amendment. Meanwhile, after initial postwar Republican victories, the political parties fought each other to a standstill for almost twenty years. From 1876 through 1892, the shift of a single state in the electoral college would have changed the results of every presidential election. In our time, a more closely divided Supreme Court has had at least as big an impact.
This week, the invalidation of the key section of the Voting Rights Act confirmed that the conservative majority has no compunction about substituting its judgment for that of the politically elected branches in defiance of precedent or the Constitution--something the Warren Court rarely did. The Voting Rights Act is a straightforward exercise of the express power granted the Congress to enforce the provisions of the 15th Amendment barring racial discrimination in voting. Congress first exercised that power in 1965 and has done so repeatedly since, most recently late in the Presidency of George W. Bush. The court has now thrown out their work because it does not feel that the 1965 rules for coming under the act should still prevail. In practice they do not--some districts in the deep South have been able to earn their way out of the act with good behavior, while various northern districts have become subjected to it. But Chief Justice Roberts did not care, and the Justice Department will no longer be able to block voter ID laws based upon their discriminatory impact. Once again, as in the Citizens United decision, a 5-4 majority composed entirely of Republican-appointed judges has given the Republican party a boost in the elections. The chance of a redefinition of eligibility getting through the current Congress appears to me to be nil.
Meanwhile, the court continued undoing the achievements of the Progressive era and the New Deal, narrowing the application of the antitrust laws in a key case involving American Express. As I recall, the Clayton Act, passed in the Wilson Administration, was specifically designed to prevent monopolies from unfairly exploiting their market power, for instance by forcing buyers of their products to buy additional ones in order to get access to the one they exclusively produced. American Express falls into that category: it has a monopoly, apparently, on credit cards for businesses, which it exploits to force restaurants to accept its consumer credit cards as well, even though it charges higher user fees than other credit cards. Bringing a suit would not be a worthwhile investment for a single restaurant, but a class action suit could save restauranteurs millions if they won at American Express's expense. The Court disallowed such a suit, effectively endorsing the use of monopoly power. This is yet another echo of the Gilded Age.
But two different majorities essentially invalidated the federal Defense of Marriage Act and undid Proposition 8 in California, which had banned same-sex marriage. Incredibly, Justice Scalia, dissenting in the DOMA case, blasted the majority for overruling the will of Congress and the Executive, even though he had helped do the same in the Voting Rights case earlier in the week, and even though DOMA is nearly ten years older than the latest revision of the Voting Rights Act. I am glad that gay marriage remains a matter for individual states. Roe v. Wade was disastrous for American politics because it created a new right-wing cause of enormous power, and I do not think that cause would have played such a role in our national life had the states retained the power to legalize abortion, as the two largest ones had already done in 1973. Pressure will mount even on states like Texas to recognize gay unions. This is a real victory for human rights, but it exemplifies what has happened to liberal politics in the last forty years.
Gay marriage is a step forward in individual freedom and a welcome one. Unfortunately, the rights of women, minorities, and gays have been virtually the only issues around which liberals have been able to organize themselves over the last few decades. Progress in those areas has certainly helped highly educated women and minorities realize their dreams, and open gays can now lead much happier lives, but the bulk of the population continues steadily to lose ground. It is not clear to me that lower-income women or minorities and better off than they were 40 years ago, and the Democratic Party is now unable to do much about that. Ironically gay marriage is a major step towards more traditional values, since it is about family formation. I don't think we know yet exactly what the long-term effects of the decline of the traditional family are going to be.
Thus, during this crisis, each side has gotten what it wanted most. The Democrats have secured rights for women, minorities and gays; the Republicans have promoted massive economic inequality and corporate freedom. This is another parallel to the Civil War crisis, in which Democrats managed to restore white supremacy in the south while Republicans established corporate supremacy all over the nation. These will be the legacies of the Boom generation. I am not sure that generation will live to see the country go in a new direction.l
The Supreme Court played an enormous role in the post-civil war period, striking down civil rights legislation and the income tax, limiting the federal government's ability to protect the rights of freed slaves, and providing new legal protections for corporations under the 14th Amendment. Meanwhile, after initial postwar Republican victories, the political parties fought each other to a standstill for almost twenty years. From 1876 through 1892, the shift of a single state in the electoral college would have changed the results of every presidential election. In our time, a more closely divided Supreme Court has had at least as big an impact.
This week, the invalidation of the key section of the Voting Rights Act confirmed that the conservative majority has no compunction about substituting its judgment for that of the politically elected branches in defiance of precedent or the Constitution--something the Warren Court rarely did. The Voting Rights Act is a straightforward exercise of the express power granted the Congress to enforce the provisions of the 15th Amendment barring racial discrimination in voting. Congress first exercised that power in 1965 and has done so repeatedly since, most recently late in the Presidency of George W. Bush. The court has now thrown out their work because it does not feel that the 1965 rules for coming under the act should still prevail. In practice they do not--some districts in the deep South have been able to earn their way out of the act with good behavior, while various northern districts have become subjected to it. But Chief Justice Roberts did not care, and the Justice Department will no longer be able to block voter ID laws based upon their discriminatory impact. Once again, as in the Citizens United decision, a 5-4 majority composed entirely of Republican-appointed judges has given the Republican party a boost in the elections. The chance of a redefinition of eligibility getting through the current Congress appears to me to be nil.
Meanwhile, the court continued undoing the achievements of the Progressive era and the New Deal, narrowing the application of the antitrust laws in a key case involving American Express. As I recall, the Clayton Act, passed in the Wilson Administration, was specifically designed to prevent monopolies from unfairly exploiting their market power, for instance by forcing buyers of their products to buy additional ones in order to get access to the one they exclusively produced. American Express falls into that category: it has a monopoly, apparently, on credit cards for businesses, which it exploits to force restaurants to accept its consumer credit cards as well, even though it charges higher user fees than other credit cards. Bringing a suit would not be a worthwhile investment for a single restaurant, but a class action suit could save restauranteurs millions if they won at American Express's expense. The Court disallowed such a suit, effectively endorsing the use of monopoly power. This is yet another echo of the Gilded Age.
But two different majorities essentially invalidated the federal Defense of Marriage Act and undid Proposition 8 in California, which had banned same-sex marriage. Incredibly, Justice Scalia, dissenting in the DOMA case, blasted the majority for overruling the will of Congress and the Executive, even though he had helped do the same in the Voting Rights case earlier in the week, and even though DOMA is nearly ten years older than the latest revision of the Voting Rights Act. I am glad that gay marriage remains a matter for individual states. Roe v. Wade was disastrous for American politics because it created a new right-wing cause of enormous power, and I do not think that cause would have played such a role in our national life had the states retained the power to legalize abortion, as the two largest ones had already done in 1973. Pressure will mount even on states like Texas to recognize gay unions. This is a real victory for human rights, but it exemplifies what has happened to liberal politics in the last forty years.
Gay marriage is a step forward in individual freedom and a welcome one. Unfortunately, the rights of women, minorities, and gays have been virtually the only issues around which liberals have been able to organize themselves over the last few decades. Progress in those areas has certainly helped highly educated women and minorities realize their dreams, and open gays can now lead much happier lives, but the bulk of the population continues steadily to lose ground. It is not clear to me that lower-income women or minorities and better off than they were 40 years ago, and the Democratic Party is now unable to do much about that. Ironically gay marriage is a major step towards more traditional values, since it is about family formation. I don't think we know yet exactly what the long-term effects of the decline of the traditional family are going to be.
Thus, during this crisis, each side has gotten what it wanted most. The Democrats have secured rights for women, minorities and gays; the Republicans have promoted massive economic inequality and corporate freedom. This is another parallel to the Civil War crisis, in which Democrats managed to restore white supremacy in the south while Republicans established corporate supremacy all over the nation. These will be the legacies of the Boom generation. I am not sure that generation will live to see the country go in a new direction.l
Friday, May 17, 2013
The turning point
This is a big month for yours truly, marking the end of my formal full-time academic career. But I suspect it will live in history as a critical month for another reason: the end of any hope that the Obama Administration will accomplish anything further, and, quite probably,. of the modern era of liberalism. Several years ago I made a new friend who spent some time reading through the posts I had made since 2004, and she complimented me that so many of my predictions had come true. I'm afraid the time has come for more predictions. The Republicans will gain a few seats in the House and Senate in 2014, and it's quite likely that they will regain the White House in 2016. The will precede to the final dismantling of the work of the Great Society, having finished off the New Deal some time ago.
Barack Obama entered office five years ago possessed of solid majorities in the House and Senate, and facing a national crisis that everyone had to acknowledge. But from the beginning, he chased an impossible dream: the restoration of a bipartisan spirit in Washington. He never had the slightest success, but he has not, as we shall see, given up the dream yet. And this was the key to the mistake he has made again and again. This quintessentially political young man, who had parlayed his considerable assets into fame, fortune, and high office at every stage of his career, based his proposals on what could easily be passed, rather than upon what the country might in the long run really need. Even if the stimulus was a much as he could get, he could have put more of it into infrastructure spending and less of it into tax cuts designed (hopelessly) to draw Republican support. He appointed an entirely centrist economic team, one that saw nothing fundamentally wrong with our finance-dominated economy. He did not realize that the whole future of his Presidency depended on improving the lot of the bulk of the American people by the time of the 2010 elections--the feat which Franklin Roosevelt accomplished in 1933-4. And he decided after the stimulus to put all his remaining capital into health care reform, even though it would be years before it had any measurable effect. That reform, too, was written so as not to offend any powerful interests, on the assumption that we could fix the real problems we face without offending them.
To be sure, even in his first two years Obama had much less to work with than it seemed. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are in thrall to financial interests. Democrats are very weak at the state level in much of the country. Nearly 35 years of constant anti-government, free market rhetoric have left the vision of the middle of the century behind. To make government effective again Obama had to revive them, and this he has never really tried to do. We will never know whether any one else could have, but it is worth noting that Obama brought many of the same people back into government that Hillary Clinton would have.
Despite Obama's re-election victory, the Republicans have been driving the national agenda since 2011. Their debt-limit brinkmanship forced Obama into the sequester, again on the absolutely mad assumption that today's Republican Party would shrink from actually implementing the cuts involved. In fact their only regret, as they see the federal government crippled and the country threatened with a new recession as a result, is that they did not go further. Destroy the government and the economy and blame the Democrats has been their motto for a long time, and they were not going to abandon it for him. The same drama is playing out in many states, although California is now back on a more responsible track. I was shocked that Obama actually told a New York fundraiser that he thought his victory last November would "break the fever" among the Republicans and make them start working with him. They will never work with him. They want to destroy him and, more importantly, everything he stands for.
I must admit that I thought Obama's decision to make a new stand on gun control might make political sense. His own Generation X voted for him in the last election, but his response to the school shooting might well appeal to that generation's hyperprotective parents and thus change the political calculus for some Republicans. Clearly, however, I was wrong. The NRA brushed the challenge aside and the House of Representatives wasn't even forced to vote on what was, once again, a very moderate bill. Even before the events of the past week I was very doubtful that Obama would get substantial immigration reform. Yes, the Republicans are losing the Hispanic vote over this issue, but they might lose it even worse if the President actually gave millions of Hispanics a path to citizenship. The mantra remains what it has been since Newt Gingrich: don't let a Democratic President accomplish anything meaningful if you can help it, because that will once again show that government can solve problems. By making it ineffective, we can kill public faith in it.
And now, three "scandals" have given the Republicans a new life. None of them is really very significant. The Benghazi accusations are made almost entirely of whole cloth. The subpoena for AP records is a troubling reminder that this is the hardest Administration on leaks in history, and it has alienated much of the Democratic base. The IRS scandal is a perfect reminder of Talleyrand's famous words to Napoleon: "Sire, it's worse than a crime, it's a blunder." It will re-mobilize the Republican base as nothing else could, and the Republicans, aided by the entire media, will drag it out for months and months, just as they did Whitewater. There is already considerable talk in the House about another impeachment of the President. Don't rule it out. And incredibly, no one has raised what seems to me a rather obvious question: why should Tea Party groups, or any other political organizations, receive tax exemptions as charitable organizations? I'd really like to know.
Another crisis is looming over health care. Republicans constantly declare that many businesses will cut their workers back to part-time status so as not to have to buy insurance for them--and that might well turn out to be true. The implementation of the reform may be a public relations disaster.
The United States has been in a second civil war since the election of Bill Clinton. The Republicans are winning perhaps it was because it was their historical turn--a subject for another day--but surely because they are the only side that has really been fighting. Clinton and Obama have been status quo Presidents, offering very little that was new and almost nothing that appeared to the mass of the American people to make their lives better. Again and again they have bee willing to compromise, while the Republicans never do. And the growth of Republican power has indeed reduced the federal government to ineffectiveness on many levels. A Democratic victory in 2016 is anything but assured. A recent study--and not a right-wing one--argued that only the black turnout won the election for Obama last time, and the next Democratic candidate will not be black. Nor can we be sure that Hispanics will continue to vote Democratic if the state of the country continues to deteriorate.
Obama, it seems to me, could do the country some good by talking, at every opportunity, about the economic steps the country really needs: more spending, not less; much higher taxes on the wealthy; a reduction of the influence of the financial sector; and better public services. The only thing he can do now is to position the Democrats for the moment when it becomes clear that things are getting worse again. Instead, he is more likely to look for a "grand bargain" that will implicate him and his party in a new series of disasters. Meanwhile, the younger generations are completely losing faith in politics. In my last full-time college class last week, I mentioned that Kennedy had inspired much of my generation, and Reagan had inspired Generation X. "Has Obama inspired you?" I asked the class, which was certainly composed mainly of liberals. A long silence followed. "Well, maybe until he was elected," one young man replied. That, in a nutshell, is the tragedy of Barack Obama--and of the present-day United States.
Barack Obama entered office five years ago possessed of solid majorities in the House and Senate, and facing a national crisis that everyone had to acknowledge. But from the beginning, he chased an impossible dream: the restoration of a bipartisan spirit in Washington. He never had the slightest success, but he has not, as we shall see, given up the dream yet. And this was the key to the mistake he has made again and again. This quintessentially political young man, who had parlayed his considerable assets into fame, fortune, and high office at every stage of his career, based his proposals on what could easily be passed, rather than upon what the country might in the long run really need. Even if the stimulus was a much as he could get, he could have put more of it into infrastructure spending and less of it into tax cuts designed (hopelessly) to draw Republican support. He appointed an entirely centrist economic team, one that saw nothing fundamentally wrong with our finance-dominated economy. He did not realize that the whole future of his Presidency depended on improving the lot of the bulk of the American people by the time of the 2010 elections--the feat which Franklin Roosevelt accomplished in 1933-4. And he decided after the stimulus to put all his remaining capital into health care reform, even though it would be years before it had any measurable effect. That reform, too, was written so as not to offend any powerful interests, on the assumption that we could fix the real problems we face without offending them.
To be sure, even in his first two years Obama had much less to work with than it seemed. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are in thrall to financial interests. Democrats are very weak at the state level in much of the country. Nearly 35 years of constant anti-government, free market rhetoric have left the vision of the middle of the century behind. To make government effective again Obama had to revive them, and this he has never really tried to do. We will never know whether any one else could have, but it is worth noting that Obama brought many of the same people back into government that Hillary Clinton would have.
Despite Obama's re-election victory, the Republicans have been driving the national agenda since 2011. Their debt-limit brinkmanship forced Obama into the sequester, again on the absolutely mad assumption that today's Republican Party would shrink from actually implementing the cuts involved. In fact their only regret, as they see the federal government crippled and the country threatened with a new recession as a result, is that they did not go further. Destroy the government and the economy and blame the Democrats has been their motto for a long time, and they were not going to abandon it for him. The same drama is playing out in many states, although California is now back on a more responsible track. I was shocked that Obama actually told a New York fundraiser that he thought his victory last November would "break the fever" among the Republicans and make them start working with him. They will never work with him. They want to destroy him and, more importantly, everything he stands for.
I must admit that I thought Obama's decision to make a new stand on gun control might make political sense. His own Generation X voted for him in the last election, but his response to the school shooting might well appeal to that generation's hyperprotective parents and thus change the political calculus for some Republicans. Clearly, however, I was wrong. The NRA brushed the challenge aside and the House of Representatives wasn't even forced to vote on what was, once again, a very moderate bill. Even before the events of the past week I was very doubtful that Obama would get substantial immigration reform. Yes, the Republicans are losing the Hispanic vote over this issue, but they might lose it even worse if the President actually gave millions of Hispanics a path to citizenship. The mantra remains what it has been since Newt Gingrich: don't let a Democratic President accomplish anything meaningful if you can help it, because that will once again show that government can solve problems. By making it ineffective, we can kill public faith in it.
And now, three "scandals" have given the Republicans a new life. None of them is really very significant. The Benghazi accusations are made almost entirely of whole cloth. The subpoena for AP records is a troubling reminder that this is the hardest Administration on leaks in history, and it has alienated much of the Democratic base. The IRS scandal is a perfect reminder of Talleyrand's famous words to Napoleon: "Sire, it's worse than a crime, it's a blunder." It will re-mobilize the Republican base as nothing else could, and the Republicans, aided by the entire media, will drag it out for months and months, just as they did Whitewater. There is already considerable talk in the House about another impeachment of the President. Don't rule it out. And incredibly, no one has raised what seems to me a rather obvious question: why should Tea Party groups, or any other political organizations, receive tax exemptions as charitable organizations? I'd really like to know.
Another crisis is looming over health care. Republicans constantly declare that many businesses will cut their workers back to part-time status so as not to have to buy insurance for them--and that might well turn out to be true. The implementation of the reform may be a public relations disaster.
The United States has been in a second civil war since the election of Bill Clinton. The Republicans are winning perhaps it was because it was their historical turn--a subject for another day--but surely because they are the only side that has really been fighting. Clinton and Obama have been status quo Presidents, offering very little that was new and almost nothing that appeared to the mass of the American people to make their lives better. Again and again they have bee willing to compromise, while the Republicans never do. And the growth of Republican power has indeed reduced the federal government to ineffectiveness on many levels. A Democratic victory in 2016 is anything but assured. A recent study--and not a right-wing one--argued that only the black turnout won the election for Obama last time, and the next Democratic candidate will not be black. Nor can we be sure that Hispanics will continue to vote Democratic if the state of the country continues to deteriorate.
Obama, it seems to me, could do the country some good by talking, at every opportunity, about the economic steps the country really needs: more spending, not less; much higher taxes on the wealthy; a reduction of the influence of the financial sector; and better public services. The only thing he can do now is to position the Democrats for the moment when it becomes clear that things are getting worse again. Instead, he is more likely to look for a "grand bargain" that will implicate him and his party in a new series of disasters. Meanwhile, the younger generations are completely losing faith in politics. In my last full-time college class last week, I mentioned that Kennedy had inspired much of my generation, and Reagan had inspired Generation X. "Has Obama inspired you?" I asked the class, which was certainly composed mainly of liberals. A long silence followed. "Well, maybe until he was elected," one young man replied. That, in a nutshell, is the tragedy of Barack Obama--and of the present-day United States.
Friday, April 08, 2011
The End of an Era?
The government shutdown is in the news, but I doubt very much that it will look extremely significant thirty years from now. Yes, the Democrats may successfully save funding for Planned Parenthood, but they have already agreed to cuts big enough to do a great deal of harm to important parts of the federal government without making any significant impact upon the deficit. We all remember that Bill Clinton prevailed politically the last time we had a shutdown, but I also remember that he had reacted to the Republican victory in 1994 by announcing that the era of big government was over. Now it looks to me as if an era of American civilization--though not, perhaps, western civilization--that has lasted about a century is coming to an end.
Quite simply, that was the era in which Americans believed that they could, through their government, apply reason and science to improve their lives and insure a certain degree of justice within the framework of a modern, capitalist economy. Capitalism's extraordinary capacity to generate inequality had become apparent before the First World War, and two younger generations--the Progressives (born about 1842-62) and the Missionaries (about 1863-1884) had reacted with various reform movements. The accidental accession of Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 brought these ideas into the White House, and Roosevelt talked specifically about using the power of the executive branch and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to curb monopoly power and give the American people a "square deal." He did not get far, but the new generation got its chance in 1932 as a result of the Depression--and as the British say, they took it. The New Deal aimed specifically at regulating the excesses of the financial system, regulating agricultural and industrial markets, insuring the rights of labor, increasing the tax burden on the wealthy even in the midst of the depression, putting the unemployed to work, and providing social security in old age. While far from a complete success, it won the support of well over half the American people and enshrined a new way of thinking. The Nomadic Lost generation (b. about 1885-1904) was not won over to the New Deal, but some of its more liberal members played key roles in it nonetheless. The sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of the GI generation in the Second World War created a new sense of government responsibility to the people, and even the Lost collaborated in the construction of a new postwar society. By the time the Republicans regained the White House in 1953 they had no real desire to undo the achievements of the last twenty years.
"When I was a young man," the great Missionary W. E. B. Dubois (1868-1963) wrote in the late 1930s, "the foundations of present culture were laid, the way was charted, the progress toward certain great goals was undoubted and inevitable. There was room for argument concerning details and methods and possible detours in the onsweep of civilization, but the fundamental facts were clear, unquestioned and unquestionable." So it was too in my youth, and especially in the first half the 1960s, when JFK and LBJ tried to extend the New Deal tradition still further. Yet as so happens, the apotheosis of that particular civilization also marked the beginning of the end. The Vietnam War, that awful product of GI hubris, accelerated the process, but perhaps it was inevitable in any case. In 2000, at the end of my book American Tragedy, I drew on Strauss and Howe and predicted some kind of crisis and civic rebirth. I was right about the former; it seems now I was wrong about the latter, and I can see why.
The United States has in many ways been on a downward path since the age of Reagan. Reagan introduced two critical new trends: the gradual erosion of our progressive tax code (Reagan did not, in fact cut taxes--he shifted them to the middle and lower classes), and the decline of union rights and the de-industrialization of America. But Reagan was a GI, as were the leaders of the Congress in the 1980s, and the process was not allowed to go that far. The deregulation of the S & L industry in the late 1980s was catastrophic, but then, at least, the perpetrators faced punishment. 5000 industry insiders drew jail time for S & L fraud; not one major player has been convicted of anything for the crash of 2007. That is because in the interim new generations have come to the fore, with completely new principles.
The Silent generation (born 1925-42) got the deregulatory ball rolling. Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and many of the other key players in the process were Silents. But a Boomer President and an increasingly Boomer Republican Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. The process accelerated under George W. Bush. By cutting taxes and embarking upon two very long wars at the same time, Bush created a new permanent federal deficit even in good times. That has turned out to be a critical achievement for him and those on his side of the aisle, because it has made it absolutely impossible for the federal government to respond adequately to the economic crisis that deregulation brought about.
To Prophet generations like the Boomers, Strauss and Howe argued, falls the duty of giving society a new direction when the old order collapsed. We have failed that test, and our day in power is just about over, even though the youngest Boomers have only just turned 50. Why? Conservative Boomers, like conservatives of every generation except perhaps the GIs, have been devotees of the free market, which is really another form of social Darwinism. The most transformational Boomer President was George W. Bush, who crippled the finances of the federal government and started an endless involvement in the Middle East. But what about liberal Boomers?
Forty years ago our parents viewed liberal Boomers protesting the Vietnam War as spoiled children. It turns out that they were right, although not perhaps in exactly the way we believed. Liberal Boomers--including the few liberal politicians of any importance like Bill Clinton--have pretty much abandoned the New Deal tradition. They have stood by or collaborated in the de-industrialization of America and the deregulation of the financial system. Instead, they have focused on the rights of minorities, women, and gays. Those were important issues, but they stood out in the 1960s and 1970s largely because other at least equally important economic issues had been solved by our parents. We took those achievements for granted and assumed they would go on forever. They would not. We have secured minorities' equal right to participate--but in what?
Universities were a big part of the New Deal coalition, and provided a lot of the ideas that went into social and economic reform from the 1930s through the 1960s. The economists who taught me as a freshman were focused above all on keeping employment high, the legacy of their youth. They gave way to free-marketeers who almost totally dominate the economics profession now--and who, as the film Inside Job showed, are rewarded with six-figure consulting contracts. Many historians also focused upon the role of the state in society and the economy. Now those topics are virtually ignored by the faculty of our leading colleges and universities.
And that is why, it seems to me, today, in the midst of an economic, budgetary and political crisis, there is really no counterpoint to Republicans' continuing efforts to destroy the government. Roosevelt seized on the Great Depression as an opportunity to build up the federal government. They have seized upon the Great Recession as an opportunity to destroy government at every level. The punditocracy, with virtually no exceptions, has cooperated now in promoting the idea that cutting the deficit is our most important task--and no one takes the idea of tax increases seriously any more. There will be no Boomer President to restore a stronger role of government in the economy.
Generation X has gained enormously in power during the last three years. It occupies the White House and makes up most of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. And Generation X has no memory either of the New Deal or the postwar High. It spent its childhood amidst collapsing institutions, particularly the institution of the family, and it emerged with a lifelong distrust. The vast majority of Gen Xers view our crisis as a purely individual matter and are not interested in uniting for the common good. A Gen X Congressman, Paul Ryan, has just introduced a plan to destroy Medicare just in time for his own generation to retire. One cannot understand how that could happen without generational theory.
The attack on government has also become an attack on reason in public life. It is no accident that the darlings of the new right have included people like Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann, who actually thought that the Revolutionary War had begun in Concord, New Hampshire. Intelligence is now seen as an attribute of an out-of-touch elite. It is clear that the Republican plans for health care, the economy and the budget are catastrophic--cutting government at all levels will impede recovery, not help it, and the free market is what has gotten us where we are today. But they do not care. The rationalist impulse is only one human impulse, and not by any means the strongest one. For the time being it seems that it has had its day. We live in a world of sound bites and images, with little time for reflection and understanding, and that is making it harder and harder to deal with our problems.
The Millennial generation (born about 1982-2002) might have been the new GIs, had the older generations enlisted them, too, in a great crusade. Now it seems that will not happen. Some of them are engaged in small-scale crusades of their own, using their own brains and their cooperative spirit to solve problems. That holds out a little hope for the present and more for the future. But for the next decade or two there seems little hope for any escape from our new Gilded Age. Boomers lived through a great era of American politics. Unfortunately for them and their children and grandchildren, it came to an end as they reached adulthood. Yet we can remain faithful to the best of our past, just as Europeans like Stendhal kept alive the ideals of the French Revolution in the 1820s, secure in their faith that such times would come again--as indeed, eventually, they did.
P.S. Last night, after an agreement was reached to avert a shutdown, President Obama said that Americans of different beliefs had come together and hailed "the biggest annual spending cut in history." Yes: the Republicans won on the principle of dismantling the federal government at home, the Democrats won on funding for planned parenthood and powers for the EPA that will never be effectively applied. (As of 8:20 this morning EDT, no one seems to know whether funding for PBS survived or not.) That is a fitting commentary on the power of the two parties today, and on how President Obama increasingly sees himself: a Democrat on social issues and a moderate Republican on economic ones.
Quite simply, that was the era in which Americans believed that they could, through their government, apply reason and science to improve their lives and insure a certain degree of justice within the framework of a modern, capitalist economy. Capitalism's extraordinary capacity to generate inequality had become apparent before the First World War, and two younger generations--the Progressives (born about 1842-62) and the Missionaries (about 1863-1884) had reacted with various reform movements. The accidental accession of Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 brought these ideas into the White House, and Roosevelt talked specifically about using the power of the executive branch and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to curb monopoly power and give the American people a "square deal." He did not get far, but the new generation got its chance in 1932 as a result of the Depression--and as the British say, they took it. The New Deal aimed specifically at regulating the excesses of the financial system, regulating agricultural and industrial markets, insuring the rights of labor, increasing the tax burden on the wealthy even in the midst of the depression, putting the unemployed to work, and providing social security in old age. While far from a complete success, it won the support of well over half the American people and enshrined a new way of thinking. The Nomadic Lost generation (b. about 1885-1904) was not won over to the New Deal, but some of its more liberal members played key roles in it nonetheless. The sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of the GI generation in the Second World War created a new sense of government responsibility to the people, and even the Lost collaborated in the construction of a new postwar society. By the time the Republicans regained the White House in 1953 they had no real desire to undo the achievements of the last twenty years.
"When I was a young man," the great Missionary W. E. B. Dubois (1868-1963) wrote in the late 1930s, "the foundations of present culture were laid, the way was charted, the progress toward certain great goals was undoubted and inevitable. There was room for argument concerning details and methods and possible detours in the onsweep of civilization, but the fundamental facts were clear, unquestioned and unquestionable." So it was too in my youth, and especially in the first half the 1960s, when JFK and LBJ tried to extend the New Deal tradition still further. Yet as so happens, the apotheosis of that particular civilization also marked the beginning of the end. The Vietnam War, that awful product of GI hubris, accelerated the process, but perhaps it was inevitable in any case. In 2000, at the end of my book American Tragedy, I drew on Strauss and Howe and predicted some kind of crisis and civic rebirth. I was right about the former; it seems now I was wrong about the latter, and I can see why.
The United States has in many ways been on a downward path since the age of Reagan. Reagan introduced two critical new trends: the gradual erosion of our progressive tax code (Reagan did not, in fact cut taxes--he shifted them to the middle and lower classes), and the decline of union rights and the de-industrialization of America. But Reagan was a GI, as were the leaders of the Congress in the 1980s, and the process was not allowed to go that far. The deregulation of the S & L industry in the late 1980s was catastrophic, but then, at least, the perpetrators faced punishment. 5000 industry insiders drew jail time for S & L fraud; not one major player has been convicted of anything for the crash of 2007. That is because in the interim new generations have come to the fore, with completely new principles.
The Silent generation (born 1925-42) got the deregulatory ball rolling. Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and many of the other key players in the process were Silents. But a Boomer President and an increasingly Boomer Republican Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. The process accelerated under George W. Bush. By cutting taxes and embarking upon two very long wars at the same time, Bush created a new permanent federal deficit even in good times. That has turned out to be a critical achievement for him and those on his side of the aisle, because it has made it absolutely impossible for the federal government to respond adequately to the economic crisis that deregulation brought about.
To Prophet generations like the Boomers, Strauss and Howe argued, falls the duty of giving society a new direction when the old order collapsed. We have failed that test, and our day in power is just about over, even though the youngest Boomers have only just turned 50. Why? Conservative Boomers, like conservatives of every generation except perhaps the GIs, have been devotees of the free market, which is really another form of social Darwinism. The most transformational Boomer President was George W. Bush, who crippled the finances of the federal government and started an endless involvement in the Middle East. But what about liberal Boomers?
Forty years ago our parents viewed liberal Boomers protesting the Vietnam War as spoiled children. It turns out that they were right, although not perhaps in exactly the way we believed. Liberal Boomers--including the few liberal politicians of any importance like Bill Clinton--have pretty much abandoned the New Deal tradition. They have stood by or collaborated in the de-industrialization of America and the deregulation of the financial system. Instead, they have focused on the rights of minorities, women, and gays. Those were important issues, but they stood out in the 1960s and 1970s largely because other at least equally important economic issues had been solved by our parents. We took those achievements for granted and assumed they would go on forever. They would not. We have secured minorities' equal right to participate--but in what?
Universities were a big part of the New Deal coalition, and provided a lot of the ideas that went into social and economic reform from the 1930s through the 1960s. The economists who taught me as a freshman were focused above all on keeping employment high, the legacy of their youth. They gave way to free-marketeers who almost totally dominate the economics profession now--and who, as the film Inside Job showed, are rewarded with six-figure consulting contracts. Many historians also focused upon the role of the state in society and the economy. Now those topics are virtually ignored by the faculty of our leading colleges and universities.
And that is why, it seems to me, today, in the midst of an economic, budgetary and political crisis, there is really no counterpoint to Republicans' continuing efforts to destroy the government. Roosevelt seized on the Great Depression as an opportunity to build up the federal government. They have seized upon the Great Recession as an opportunity to destroy government at every level. The punditocracy, with virtually no exceptions, has cooperated now in promoting the idea that cutting the deficit is our most important task--and no one takes the idea of tax increases seriously any more. There will be no Boomer President to restore a stronger role of government in the economy.
Generation X has gained enormously in power during the last three years. It occupies the White House and makes up most of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. And Generation X has no memory either of the New Deal or the postwar High. It spent its childhood amidst collapsing institutions, particularly the institution of the family, and it emerged with a lifelong distrust. The vast majority of Gen Xers view our crisis as a purely individual matter and are not interested in uniting for the common good. A Gen X Congressman, Paul Ryan, has just introduced a plan to destroy Medicare just in time for his own generation to retire. One cannot understand how that could happen without generational theory.
The attack on government has also become an attack on reason in public life. It is no accident that the darlings of the new right have included people like Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann, who actually thought that the Revolutionary War had begun in Concord, New Hampshire. Intelligence is now seen as an attribute of an out-of-touch elite. It is clear that the Republican plans for health care, the economy and the budget are catastrophic--cutting government at all levels will impede recovery, not help it, and the free market is what has gotten us where we are today. But they do not care. The rationalist impulse is only one human impulse, and not by any means the strongest one. For the time being it seems that it has had its day. We live in a world of sound bites and images, with little time for reflection and understanding, and that is making it harder and harder to deal with our problems.
The Millennial generation (born about 1982-2002) might have been the new GIs, had the older generations enlisted them, too, in a great crusade. Now it seems that will not happen. Some of them are engaged in small-scale crusades of their own, using their own brains and their cooperative spirit to solve problems. That holds out a little hope for the present and more for the future. But for the next decade or two there seems little hope for any escape from our new Gilded Age. Boomers lived through a great era of American politics. Unfortunately for them and their children and grandchildren, it came to an end as they reached adulthood. Yet we can remain faithful to the best of our past, just as Europeans like Stendhal kept alive the ideals of the French Revolution in the 1820s, secure in their faith that such times would come again--as indeed, eventually, they did.
P.S. Last night, after an agreement was reached to avert a shutdown, President Obama said that Americans of different beliefs had come together and hailed "the biggest annual spending cut in history." Yes: the Republicans won on the principle of dismantling the federal government at home, the Democrats won on funding for planned parenthood and powers for the EPA that will never be effectively applied. (As of 8:20 this morning EDT, no one seems to know whether funding for PBS survived or not.) That is a fitting commentary on the power of the two parties today, and on how President Obama increasingly sees himself: a Democrat on social issues and a moderate Republican on economic ones.
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