In Robert Reich’s Facebook post of November 4, 2013, he writes, “The biggest irony of the last three decades is that the football field of American politics has moved to the right just as most Americans have slid downward. Ever since Ronald Reagan first peddled the snake oil of trickle-down economics, the rich have received a steadily larger share of the economy’s gains — now the largest in over a century — while the typical working American has lost ground.” Why did this happen? The most obvious factor was the Reagan Revolution, sure. But something else was happening as well. We may forget how big a threat the Soviet Union and Mao’s China was to the United States. And the biggest threat wasn’t a military one. It was an ideological threat. Think of Castro’s Cuba. It was no military threat to the United States. Fear of its ideology made it a continuing threat, however.
The wealthiest Americans don’t want there to be an alternative to their unfree “free” market. Their so-called “free” market is unfree, of course, because they rig the laws and regulations in every way they can to make sure they have all the advantages in trade. Billions of dollars in assistance were pumped into the banks to help the richest Americans when the banks collapsed. A continuing effort to strip ordinary Americans of any safety net is ongoing.
Comparisons have been made between what we’re seeing now and what was seen in the late-19th and early-20th centuries when the “robber barons” had to be reined in by regulation. Republican president Theodore Roosevelt led the progressive charge against them. Socialism was on the rise. And while a lot of progressives were not socialists in any Marxist sense, they sympathized with the movement.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle appeared in 1906. In confronting the crooked politicians of his day, Sinclair wrote, “All of these agencies of corruption were banded together, and leagued in blood brotherhood with the politician and the police; more often than not they were one and the same person, –the police captain would own the brothel he pretended to raid, and the politician would open his headquarters in his saloon.” The main character in The Jungle was a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis Rudkis. He came to the US believing myths about “the land of opportunity,” only to be swindled by the ruling elite time and again, and subjected to horrendous labor conditions. A man who loathed unions when he first came to the US, Rudkis learned by the end of his adventure to realize how unfree the “free” market in the US really was. And he became a socialist organizer. At one point during a rally, Sinclair gives a socialist activist these words: “To you, the toilers, who have made this land, and have no voice in its councils! To you, whose lot it is to sow that others may reap, to labor and obey, and ask no more than the wages of a beast of burden, the food and shelter to keep you alive from day to day. It is to you that I come with my message of salvation, it is to you that I appeal.”
I just finished reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s less well-known 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, and it similarly concludes with an extended argument on the virtues of socialism. The main character, Amory Blaine, argues with someone from the upper class he’s just fallen from, saying at one point that the rich “always believe that ‘things are in a bad way now,’ but they ‘haven’t any faith in these idealists.’ One minute they call Wilson ‘just a dreamer, not practical’- a year later they rail at him for making his dreams realities. They haven’t clear logical ideas on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change. They don’t think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won’t see that if they don’t pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we’re going round and round in a circle.”
Fitzgerald, through Amory Blaine, points out that it’s “the red flag” that scares the rich. This made me recall how Hemingway had gone to Spain to help the socialists fight there. I thought about Richard Rorty’s parents coming into adulthood during this time as Trotskyites, and Rorty’s grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, who was one of the leading proponents of what became known as “The Social Gospel.” Eugene Debs was never successful as a socialist candidate in the US, but many of his ideas were adopted by the Democratic party under FDR following the Crash of ’29.
There were some who never forgave FDR for this small nod to socialism. Never mind that he probably saved the rich from a genuine socialist revolution. And for years, they have worked to undermine the Democrats and their progressive policies that helped ordinary Americans in the smallest of ways.
What happened during the Reagan Revolution? Yes, he persuaded many ordinary Americans that the federal budget is like an ordinary householder’s budget that must remain balanced—a complete falsehood that is undermined by the simple fact of the deficits that Reagan himself ran up. Yes, he also persuaded many ordinary Americans that if the rich get richer, they’ll have more to trickle down to the poor and middle-class; we’ve seen how well that works.
But more than anything, Reagan presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union. The “red flag” lost its threatening power. I do not mean to romanticize the Soviet Union for a moment. Most progressives in the US long sought alternatives to the Soviet approach. Most progressives wanted a democratic alternative such as developed in Europe. But the ideals of the Russians’ socialist revolution were, for a time, looked to by labor leaders and those who were against economic injustice in the US. It gave them hope and courage.
There has been no fear of labor in the United States since Reagan and the Soviet fall.
