[Mb-hair] profoundly intelligent
Charles Kaiser
Charles at charleskaiser.com
Wed Nov 3 12:11:20 PST 2004
>> 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 Clintons 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 Suskinds recent
>>>>New York Times Magazine articledoes come as a shock, but Strauss and
>>>>Howes 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 childrens 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 Bushs 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 Bushs 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
>>>>Lefts 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 countrys 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
>>>>Gores 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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-hair/attachments/20041103/a6e78cab/attachment.htm
More information about the Mb-hair
mailing list