[Mb-civic] profoundly intelligent

[Charles Kaiser]

>>         This is by my brother David, a professor of history in the 
>> strategy department of the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and the 
>> author of five books, on subjects ranging from Sacco and Vanzetti to 
>> John Kennedy and the Vietnam war.
>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>How did We Come so Far? The Meaning of Tuesday's Election
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>         The day after George Bush's re-election to the presidency, the 
>>>> evidence is mounting that the United States faces the third great 
>>>> turning point in its history as a nation. As William Strauss and Neil 
>>>> Howe have pointed out in their vitally important works Generations and 
>>>> The Fourth Turning, great crises in American political life occur 
>>>> roughly every eighty years­first in the era of the Revolutionary War 
>>>> and the Constitution, then during the Civil War, and then in the 
>>>> Depression and in the Second World War, which created the 
>>>> now-vanishing world in which every American under 62 has spent his 
>>>> entire life. (For more on their theories and their books, see 
>>>> www.fourthturning.com, where I have been a frequent contributor.) The 
>>>> election pitted two entirely different philosophies against one 
>>>> another. On the one hand, the Democrat John Kerry wants, essentially, 
>>>> to continue building upon the achievements of Franklin Roosevelt, John 
>>>> Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, with a nod to Bill Clinton’s remarkable 
>>>> budget-balancing achievements. On the other, George W. Bush wants 
>>>> almost entirely to undo the work of the twentieth century, vastly 
>>>> reducing public services, effectively ending environmental regulation, 
>>>> reducing or eliminating progressive taxation, privatizing social 
>>>> security, and essentially substituting faith for reason as our guide. 
>>>> Abroad, meanwhile, he has already junked 60 years of multilateralism 
>>>> and commitment to international law in favor of a belief in the 
>>>> efficacy of unbridled American force. These changes are so dramatic 
>>>> that many in the major media refuse to believe they are taking place. 
>>>> Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has expressed astonishment at his 
>>>> many friends who see catastrophe lurking if Bush should be reelected, 
>>>> and when Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind told Chris Matthews 
>>>> that many Bush supporters see the President as a messenger from God, 
>>>> Matthews exclaimed, “Oh, come on!” –prompting Suskind to exhort 
>>>> Matthews to get out of Washington and see what was happening in the 
>>>> rest of the country.
>>>>The wholesale repudiation of the beliefs of our educated elite at the 
>>>>highest levels of our government­amply documented in Suskind’s recent 
>>>>New York Times Magazine article­does come as a shock, but Strauss and 
>>>>Howe’s historical scheme helps understand how it has happened. Nor is 
>>>>it without precedent in western history, as something quite similar 
>>>>happened in Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. Every 
>>>>great crisis has winners and losers­and losers, as every sports fan 
>>>>knows, have longer memories and bigger incentives than winners. Bush, 
>>>>Karl Rove and the rest of the Republican establishment have managed to 
>>>>forge a coalition of the losers in both of our last two national 
>>>>crises­the business interests who resented the New Deal, and the white 
>>>>Southerners who have never been fully reconciled to the effects of the 
>>>>Northern victory in the civil war. Meanwhile the bi-coastal elite has 
>>>>made the natural but critical mistake of taking its parents’ victories 
>>>>for granted and assuming that nothing, really could change very much. 
>>>>The new conservative coalition, which initially emerged between the 
>>>>1960s and the 1980s, now may be poised to set the direction of American 
>>>>life for most of our children’s lifetimes.
>>>>The New Deal, combined with the Second World War, created the most 
>>>>progressive tax structure in American history, and in the 1950s and 
>>>>early 1960s­a period of sustained economic growth­the top marginal 
>>>>income tax rate had reached 90%. Meanwhile, labor unions dominated the 
>>>>industrial work force and insured, until 1973, that workers’ income 
>>>>would continue to increase relative to the rest of the population. 
>>>>Corporate America had to live with these changes, and some more 
>>>>enlightened business leaders accepted them as the price of civic order, 
>>>>but by the 1970s the top rates had fallen and a tax revolt was 
>>>>beginning. Foreign competition was also making heavy inroads in 
>>>>critical areas like automobile production, and this in the long run was 
>>>>going to weaken the standing of American workers. But the real 
>>>>corporate offensive against both taxes and workers’ rights began, of 
>>>>course, in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, and the erosion of the union 
>>>>movement has been dramatic since then. The US Government had been 
>>>>pushing free trade since the late 1930s, when the United States was 
>>>>industrially supreme, and in the 1990s further extensions of free 
>>>>trade, most notably through NAFTA and agreements with the Chinese, 
>>>>essentially destroyed much of our high-wage industrial economy­and the 
>>>>most important part of the New Deal voting coalition along with it. 
>>>>With three days to go to the 2004 Presidential election, Michigan has 
>>>>become a toss-up­something that would not have happened, in my opinion, 
>>>>if Democratic legislators and administrations had done more to prevent 
>>>>the collapse of American industry that Michael Moore documented in 
>>>>Roger and Me. Accustomed to ruling and comfortable in Washington, the 
>>>>Democratic leadership apparently forgot where its votes came from.
>>>>Republicans, meanwhile, could not openly repudiate the principles of 
>>>>the New Deal­that the government owed the people the assurance of jobs 
>>>>that paid living wages. Supply-side economics came to the rescue, 
>>>>arguing not that great fortunes merely represented the survival of the 
>>>>fittest (the view of post-Civil War Republicans), but that they would 
>>>>benefit the rest of the country. (The Republicans’ need to pretend that 
>>>>their policies have the opposite effect that they actually have is one 
>>>>of the chief causes of the degradation of American political life. It 
>>>>has culminated in George Bush’s campaign stump speech, which argues 
>>>>that all the beneficiaries of his tax cuts are job-creating small 
>>>>business owners.) Officially we are seeking the same goals by more 
>>>>efficient means. Actually both the relative and the absolute bargaining 
>>>>power of working-class Americans are continually eroding, and the gap 
>>>>between executive pay and worker pay has increased by one or two orders 
>>>>of magnitude. Meanwhile the economic rights of retirees are being 
>>>>stripped away as well, as guaranteed pensions are eliminated from most 
>>>>private employment. Ironically, the diminishing resources of the 
>>>>elderly are bound to create a crisis in the economy of the Republican 
>>>>Sunbelt eventually, but that may take another decade or two.
>>>>Corporate America is now stronger in Washington than it has been since 
>>>>the 1890s, and stands for the most part firmly behind the 
>>>>Administration. The broadcast media are either firmly in the Republican 
>>>>camp or too intimidated to take it on directly. The print media, where 
>>>>rationality is still prized, remains more faithful to earlier 
>>>>traditions, and Kerry commands far more newspaper endorsements, but 
>>>>even there, several publishers (such as those of the Denver Post and 
>>>>the Chicago Tribune) have overruled their editorial boards and insisted 
>>>>on backing Bush. The corporate elite has been doing what it naturally 
>>>>does, trying to amass more wealth­and the restraints against it have 
>>>>gradually come down. It has now become the biggest single pillar of the 
>>>>Republican Party.
>>>>While corporate America funds Bush (and is rewarded in return), the 
>>>>foot soldiers who provide the votes come, in their largest numbers, 
>>>>from the white South and (in smaller numbers) from the Plains states. 
>>>>To understand how this has happened we must go back even further, to 
>>>>the aftermath of the civil war.
>>>>Few historical forces equal the strength of bad conscience. In the 
>>>>aftermath of the Civil War, the white elite of the Confederacy sought 
>>>>both to re-establish its power and to prove the justice of its 
>>>>principles by keeping freed slaves in a position of permanent civil and 
>>>>economic inferiority. But the southerners continued to see themselves 
>>>>as the exploited losers in the conflict, and between 1933 and 1945 they 
>>>>aligned themselves with northern workers as part of the New Deal 
>>>>coalition. In return, Franklin Roosevelt made no major moves to 
>>>>challenge white supremacy. And the South benefited considerably from 
>>>>the Second World War and the Cold War, since senior southern 
>>>>legislators managed to make sure that a substantial part of the new 
>>>>military-industrial complex was located inside their region.
>>>>The northern Democratic embrace of the civil rights movement in 1948, 
>>>>of course, began to crack the solid South, beginning with the candidacy 
>>>>of Strom Thurmond. But the Democratic retreat became a rout, as 
>>>>President Lyndon Johnson privately predicted, after the voting rights 
>>>>act of 1965. Since then only two Democratic southerners, Jimmy Carter 
>>>>(once) and Bill Clinton, have managed to win any southern electoral 
>>>>votes at all­and Al Gore, another southerner, was unable to repeat that 
>>>>performance in 2000. Johnson was right­by signing the Voting Rights 
>>>>Act, he turned the South over to the Republican Party for a generation.
>>>>These results suggest an unpleasant truth­that the whites of most of 
>>>>the old Confederacy have never accepted full equality for black 
>>>>citizens. But the civil rights movement has had other sad and ironic 
>>>>results as well. Because many southern whites refuse to send their 
>>>>children to school with blacks, segregation is at near-1950s levels in 
>>>>much of the rural south, such as the Mississippi Delta. Because white 
>>>>voters apparently are disinclined to fund public black schools as well 
>>>>as private white ones, spending on public education remains very low, 
>>>>and the anti-tax movement is extremely popular in the South. And that 
>>>>philosophy has now been introduced into our national life by the Bush 
>>>>Administration. The underfunded No Child Left Behind Act, as currently 
>>>>administered, will result in the discrediting of thousands of public 
>>>>schools and accelerate a movement towards private ones among better-off 
>>>>Americans. Meanwhile, the testing movement, by focusing on math and 
>>>>reading, seems designed to produce a generation of poorer children 
>>>>whose intellectual skills will be just sufficient to hold down jobs at 
>>>>Wal-Mart. The cost of higher education has increased by 2.5 times, 
>>>>controlling for inflation, in the last forty years. All around the 
>>>>country, even once-great state universities like Michigan and North 
>>>>Carolina are being crippled by budget cuts.
>>>>There remains, of course, the third pillar of the new Republican 
>>>>coalition, the cultural one. This too is a key to Republican strength 
>>>>in the South, the Midwest and the Plains states, and it has been the 
>>>>hardest for blue-zone Americans to take seriously. Much of it has come 
>>>>in reaction to the sexual liberation of the last few decades, which a 
>>>>vocal and increasingly powerful minority of Americans have never 
>>>>accepted. But more generally, the Republican cultural assault involves 
>>>>a new emphasis on faith and an attack on science and rational analysis 
>>>>in general that seems to have reached the highest levels of the 
>>>>government. George Bush’s disdain for factual analyses is well known, 
>>>>and American scientific authorities have frequently branded his whole 
>>>>Administration as unwilling to acknowledge accepted science in a 
>>>>variety of fields.
>>>>The United States was a child of the Enlightenment and has 
>>>>traditionally valued its trust in science and inquiry, but reason, 
>>>>alas, seems destined to remain what David Hume (himself an 
>>>>Enlightenment figure) called it more than two centuries ago: the slave 
>>>>of the passions. Reason, indeed, which was probably never more supreme 
>>>>in American life than around 1950 or so, has been under attack in the 
>>>>academy since the 1960s, with fairly disastrous results in the 
>>>>humanities and social sciences. If postmodernists no longer feel bound 
>>>>by objective truth, why should their counterparts on the right? As I 
>>>>pointed out in my last post, reverence for truth was a casualty of the 
>>>>Left’s war on the establishment in the Vietnam era­which divided the 
>>>>left, perhaps fatally, for the rest of our lifetimes. (To be sure, the 
>>>>establishment discredited its own respect for the truth by beginning 
>>>>and continuing the war in Vietnam, but the younger generation went much 
>>>>further down that path. )The Right has followed along, with devastating 
>>>>impacts on American life.
>>>>Who can be surprised, really, that so many Americans are no longer 
>>>>voting with their heads? In 1932 both Herbert Hoover and Franklin 
>>>>Roosevelt made long speeches of astonishing factual complexity to show 
>>>>that they understood the country’s problems. During the last thirty 
>>>>years we have steadily sunk into a sound bite culture. How many 
>>>>Americans know how much the federal government spends every year, or 
>>>>what the deficit is? How many have a real sense of the recent economic 
>>>>changes in American life? How many could name the leaders of Congress, 
>>>>or actually follow the progress of legislation? In a famous and telling 
>>>>moment late in the 2000 campaign, Cokie Roberts suggested that Al 
>>>>Gore’s reference to the Dingell-Norwood Bill would turn off voters, 
>>>>because it was “Washington speak.” A well-known journalist for a major 
>>>>network, whose father had been a Congressional leader for decades, now 
>>>>regarded a knowledge of what was actually happening in Washington as 
>>>>something for a candidate to hide. With such opinion leadership, we 
>>>>cannot expect much from the American people.
>>>>And thus, it is possible, though hardly certain, that Bush's victory on 
>>>>Tuesday might indeed usher in an entirely new era in American life­one 
>>>>marked by an increasingly weak state, a shrinking safety net, a return 
>>>>of elderly poverty on a large scale, and a division of the country into 
>>>>a rich elite and a mass of insecure workers that would bring a smile to 
>>>>the face of Karl Marx. It would not be the first time that a western 
>>>>nation had taken a big step backward. Eighteenth century England had 
>>>>established the rights of man and a form of religious toleration. Its 
>>>>social life was frankly hedonistic and licentious; its politics, though 
>>>>largely limited to the aristocracy, were extraordinarily free; and 
>>>>religious belief had become a mere formality. Many leading Englishmen 
>>>>wanted to move towards democracy in the mid-eighteenth century, and but 
>>>>for George III, they might have. His rule, however, and the general 
>>>>reaction to the American and French revolutions, led England away from 
>>>>democracy and open inquiry and towards tighter aristocratic rule, a far 
>>>>greater role for the Church of England, and a more rigid and unequal 
>>>>class structure than ever in the first half of the nineteenth century, 
>>>>as the effects of the industrial revolution were first being felt. Only 
>>>>the Union victory in the American civil war, which the whole western 
>>>>world saw as a victory for democracy over aristocracy, reversed the trend.
>>>>It is possible that we are not destined for a new Victorian age. Even 
>>>>without a Kerry victory on Tuesday, Democrats and rationalists may yet 
>>>>find new energy and manage to reverse the tide. But to do so, they will 
>>>>need causes to rival the economic and religious totems of the 
>>>>Republicans. Merely standing for the status quo of the second half of 
>>>>the twentieth century is not enough. The losers in our last two crises 
>>>>have been in the ascendant for twenty years because they cared enough 
>>>>to do anything to win. That is the eternal advantage of those who have 
>>>>been denied victory for too long, and it is a far more powerful 
>>>>influence in history than we have generally recognized.
>>
>>------------------
>>
>>Postscript:
>>
>>   In an attempt to make sense of this disaster, I found a table of per 
>> capita income by states. The results were rather astonishing.
>>
>>             Of the bottom 28 states in per capita income, Bush carried 
>> 26 of them--all but Maine and Oregon. (The bottom state, Tom--you won't 
>> be surprised to learn--is Mississippi.) Florida ranks at the top of that group.
>>
>>             Of the top 23 (including DC), Kerry carried 18 of 
>> them--including the top 9.  Inside that group the only states Bush 
>> carried were Colorado, Virginia (hi Janie), Alaska, Wyoming, and Nevada.
>>
>>             A calculation I showed a view months ago showed nearly the 
>> same correlation states that spent more than the median on education per 
>> child (voted for Gore) and less (for Bush)--with the major exception of 
>> California.  (Which probably means that California is spending less of 
>> its Gross State Product on education than anyone, per capita.)
>>
>>             So much for Karl Marx!  The most pro-rich Administration 
>> since William McKinley sits in office thanks to the votes of the poorer 
>> states.  Amazing.
>>

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Charles Kaiser
Charles at charleskaiser.com  
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