There are two distinct strains of fascism. The first, what I call blackshirt fascism, comes about in the face of economic distress. This variant of fascism isn’t pathologically racist, inasmuch as minorities are willing to go along to get along and do as they are told there’s no problem. You can see this in Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, as (respectively) Moroccans and Ethiopians were vital parts of both regimes’ militaries. That’s not to say that blackshirt fascists aren’t racist, but they aren’t genocidally so. The second, what I call brownshirt fascism, comes about in the face of national humiliation, which is where the Nazis came from. These fuckers are eliminationist when it comes to race and aren’t willing in the least to abide diversity, even when minorities are obsequious to the majority.
The difference comes in the nature of stress applied to a society. In a capitalist society suffering under severe economic dislocation that applies the kind of uncertainty that the working poor usually cope with to groups that don’t usually have to face it, like the educated and middle class, it causes society to turn to alternative perspectives on existing politics. The middle class usually breaks towards fascist narratives for a couple of reasons. It’s a vision that’s far more compatible with conventional systems of government than the end goal of leftist thought. It maintains (and strengthens) the state, plays on patriotism, and retains the existing economic power dynamic by retaining the capitalist mode of production. This compatibility reassures the middle class, who are by and large not used to facing these kinds of economic pressures the way the working class is. This desire for reassurance is also the root of why these groups are willing to cast away their right of self-determination and support a totalitarian form of government, as fascist societies always create rigid roles and boundaries for the people who exist within it. To this way of thinking, people who are fucked over by these boundaries deserve it for breaking these boundaries.
All of this applies to a capitalist country that has been humiliated as a nation, as economic stress usually follows a national humiliation. However, the difference comes from the motive for seeking reassurance. In blackshirt fascism, the motive is to feel secure again. In brownshirt fascism, the motive is to feel secure again by making the nation strong once more. This retrenchment towards ethnic and national identity takes the latent nationalism that is a feature of all fascism and makes it far more malignant. By binding the reassurance that a fascist society provides to national and ethnic identity, it virtually eliminates a fascist society’s already low level of pluralism, and reduces its tolerance of subjugation of those who share its ethnic identity: a German in 1927 might not give a fuck about the Sudetenland, but the same German in 1937 sure as hell does.
Which brings me to the Golden Dawn, a fascist party on the rise in Greece. From where I sit, they are a brownshirt fascist group. This is interesting because the economic uncertainty came before the national humiliation, as Papademos’ coronation as PM by the EU, the continual scapegoating of Greece for the eurozone crisis, and the damage to Greece’s sovereignty those two things represent occured long after the economic crisis set in. Their rise is extremely worrying and depressing. It’s worrying because they will likely not be tolerant of Turkish Cyprus or the way ethnic Greeks are treated in Turkey proper, which could lead to further instability in Europe as shipping to and from the Black Sea through the Med becomes uncertain. It’s depressing because Greece fought the Italians and then the Nazis long and hard during the Second World War, with people like Archbishop Damaskinos showing true courage in the face of such malevolence.
Some of this is the fault of the establishment left. PASOK is like most “socialist” parties in Europe: neoliberal shills who aren’t willing to take a stand for the average person. The KKE has been actively working against the trade unions, left-communists, and anarchists who are trying to fight the ruinous cuts being inflicted on the people of Greece. By not standing up, fighting back, and providing a genuinely left alternative to the existing neoliberal order, both PASOK and KKE are treading dangerously close to proving Walter Benjamin right: “Behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution.”
I can only hope that the other leftists in Greece are able to do what the KKE and PASOK aren’t willing to.
Ever since Obama took office, everyone on the far right seems to bleat endlessly about ‘class warfare’. Mitt Romney does it when he talks about the politics of envy. Newt Gingrich does it when uses Dinesh DeSouza’s bullshit line about Obama being a Kenyan anti-colonialist. Paul Ryan does it when people call him on his shit-awful Medicare plan. All the various bloviating Fox News talking heads go on and on about it whenever a moderately fair tax rate is proposed for the wealthy.
On Saturday, workers violated a court order preventing them gathering within two hundred metres of the factory. The protests turned violent, workers set company cars on fire, and clashed with the police. The Police used sticks to beat back protestors, and then opened fire when their initial attempts at dispersing them had failed.
Murali Mohan a union leader and main agitator in the dispute was attacked by the police. Has was battered with batons, and died from his injuries whilst in police custody.
Nine workers required hospital treatment due to receiving bullet wounds, all of whom are said to be in a ‘critical’ condition.
After the news of Mohan’s death reached the workers, four hundred of them stormed the house of senior company executive, K. C Chandrekhar, and beat him to death.
Please note that there’s not a single mention of higher taxes or increased regulation in this story.
The far right is trying to tar President Obama, and it’s somewhat successful because no one in the American polity actually knows what class war looks like. This is mostly because what remains of the Left in the US is relatively quiescent or blends into the background whenever a larger issue comes to the fore until very recently. As examples, I’d point towards the lack of strikes by labor unions and the gays rights movement, respectively. Likewise, their rhetoric completely ignores the fact that there has been a sustained class war waged since 1980, only it’s been top-down as opposed to the scary bottom-up class war that has all the various Fox News luminaries so concerned.
Reagan breaking PATCO and advocacy for supply-side economics was class warfare. Clinton’s destruction of welfare and deregulation of financial derivatives was class warfare. Virtually the entirety of George W. Bush’s presidency was class warfare. Obama’s deficit commission and support for cuts to Social Security and Medicare is class warfare. The police repression of Occupy across the country is class warfare. It’s all class warfare, only waged against people like me on behalf of people like Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein and not the scary kind that’s the other way around.
That said, I think the era of an inactive Left is coming to an end. The mass protests in Madison was just the first hint that things were shifting. Then Occupy came about and now there’s an uptick in activity by and interest in the unions that can only do some good. And while the employing class continues to attack the working class (most recently in Indiana with their bullshit union dues freeloading law), you are finally starting to see those attacks galvanize (instead of shred the morale of) the Left.
We’re a long ways from India and storming an executive’s house to beat him to death with lead pipes (and I don’t think it’s really necessary to do that here unless you see striking workers get gunned down), but I think showing whiners like Romney and Ryan what class warfare actually looks like is coming so long as we get off our asses and get down to the hard work of waging it.
On the other hand, perhaps this generation can still come out as good, proper kvetches. Witness this popular parable making its way through corridors, water-coolers, pubs, and internet boards about Generation Y’s situation on today’s job market:
The older generations told us: “Study hard in high school, because you need to go to college. You don’t want to be stuck flipping burgers when you get older, do you?”
Well we studied hard in high school, took out loans, went to college, and graduated.
Now the older generations tell us: “Get to work flipping burgers, you spoiled brats!”
This at least comes closer to identifying the real issue: everyone from the upper-middle class downwards has found themselves reduced to just doing whatever it takes to get by and pay their bills at the end of the month. With full irony intended, this is supposed to be how the poor live! But now everyone is poor, and Gen-Y’s 85% rate of moving back in with our parents post-graduation can only hide this fact for so long.
Everyone under the age of thirty who is underemployed should be forced to read this whole piece, because it quite accurately crystallizes a fair chunk of my thinking on the current economic situation. We are all supremely fucked, and there isn’t a way out of this mess within the existing system, and what’s more I think more and more of my generation realize this, whereas our parents and Gen X don’t. When talking about these political issues with my parents, there is a reformist streak to their solutions. If we elect the right politicians, things will get fixed eventually. If the employing class can just be shamed sufficiently, they will do the right thing.
They aren’t idiots, far from it, and they are also far from being alone in falling into that kind of trap. Reformism and gradualism are basically ways to reduce the impact of the problems being created by neoliberal capitalism so that people don’t actually get pissed enough to solve the root issue, and that’s capitalism itself. Reformist programs like welfare is treating the symptom and not the cause, and so long as people treat it as a legitimate alternative to actual revolutionary change, we’ll be back in this mess even if a robust welfare state gets pushed through, be it five years from now or five decades from now. Nothing frustrates me more than otherwise decent and honest people saying, “we have to work through the system first before we try anything else,” because we’ve already tried working through the system and it’s failed miserably. It was called the post-war era, and virtually every single program implemented then is under a sustained attack now. You doubt this? Look at the entire austerity hysteria sweeping the West and then talk to me.
You have the UK Tories dismantling the welfare state and the NHS bit by bit and the Labour party sitting by and half-heartedly endorsing their actions. You have the Canadian Tories starting the pull apart their universal health care system by starting to privatize it. You have Social Security and Medicare under threat as Democrats have endorsed plans that amount to the demise of those two programs. And these are only the most visible examples. You give me twenty minutes and I’ll turn up more, because there’s always more and it’s always worse. Oh, and in most cases, the groups doing the biggest damage to these programs are usually the ones that implemented them a generation and a half ago.
The fact of the matter is that the programs like Social Security, Medicare, and labor protections were compromises that only came into being because there were a lot of folk who had learned how to fight between 1941-45 and weren’t about to come back to a Depression-era existence. The people running the show realized this, and gave some ground realizing that it could be clawed back later on down the road. So they gave ground, didn’t fight too hard against Medicare or Social Security, and negotiated decent contracts with labor unions once those institutions had been purged of most of their radicals. These compromises gave birth to the American ‘middle class’ mindset, and ultimately neutered any chance for genuinely radical ideas to gain any traction within the body politic.
Until the latest crisis, which has shown an upswing of interest in economic models that are genuinely democratic and egalitarian in nature. Hopefully the Millennials don’t fall into the trap our grandparents fell into and start to push for genuine change to the way society is organized, because otherwise nothing will get better.
One thing that is absolutely inevitable about any empire is that once it stops growing externally, it turns inward to expand its control over the people already living within its sphere of influence. In some ways, the overseas territories end up getting used as a laboratory by an empire for effective methods of control. For example, twenty seven years ago when Margaret Thatcher’s government was facing down the Miners’ Strike, it used riot control techniques developed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and informers on MI5′s payroll as well as wiretaps by that spy agency against Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Miners. This is part of the pathology of empire, and it’s true of every imperial state.
Marcellus Shale gas drilling spokesmen at an industry conference in Houston said their companies are employing former military counterinsurgency officers and recommended using military-style psychological operations strategies, or psyops, to deal with media inquiries and citizen opposition to drilling in Pennsylvania communities.
Matt Pitzarella, a Range Resources spokesman speaking to other oil and gas industry spokespeople at the conference last week, said the company hires former military psyops specialists who use those skills in Pennsylvania.
For those that don’t know, psychological operations, or psyops, is the updated term for psychological warfare. Psyops specialists attack the morale of their targets by trying to get them to question their motives, their beliefs, and their trust in their cause. Through the use of both white (truthful and nonbiased) and black (an unending torrent of lies) propaganda, psychological operators seek to undermine the moral and logical foundations of the groups they are targeting and by doing so make it easier to wipe them out by reducing their numbers and marginalizing strong voices for the cause being targeted.
That the gas companies are hiring these sorts of people to engage with antifracking advocates in the court of public opinion is seriously one of the more terrifying next steps taken by corporate power recently. Unlike the other techniques reimported from Afghanistan and Iraq for use by those in power, like law enforcement getting access to unmanned drones, it isn’t the government hiring these people, it’s Corporate America. This is significant because it represents a removal of a layer of restraint on corporate power.
In the past, when something like military force was needed by the wealthy for use against the poor, it had the police and the National Guard to serve their needs. This was true at Ludlow, at Blair Mountain, and at everymajor strikeduring theGreat Depression. This meant, in theory, that elected officeholders could exert some oversight on the actions of these bodies while they defending the employing class. In practice, such oversight rarely, if ever, got brought to bear, but it still remained as a minor institutional barrier to excesses.
In this case there is no institutional restraint applied by the government, and given the ongoing flow of disinformation and lawsuit threats that are emerging from the fracking companies, there’s no such restraint from within the companies. This is a scary development, one that will continue to subvert democracy in the name of corporate profits and can be traced directly back to our imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We will be reaping the consequences of our overseas wars for a very long time. People talk about the war after the war. That phrase usually refers to wounded veterans coming home and having to cope with physical and psychological trauma, but it seems an appropriate term to use about this situation, where the former implements of a war are getting used against us in the name of corporate profit. It looks like our war after the war is one against democracy by the wealthy, and it is a tragic turn of events.
When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week of October, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan’s advisers.
“Not sure how you want to share this good news,” he wrote. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland.”
Police and the city said Occupy has had an ongoing impact on their ability to respond to crime.
This isn’t any real shock to those who are living in Oakland and those who participated in the protests, but it should serve as a warning to left-liberals and concern trolls others who, “would totally support the Occupy movement if not for these questionable problems with police,” that you can’t trust a single word that comes out of the mouths of the cops when it comes to mass protests. These are people working for organizations whose primary remit is to maintain order in society by virtually any means required. Once you start doing things like marching or camping out in a public square to demand significant change to society, they will put a set of crosshairs on your back. This is because doing these things is outside of the electoral process, which is the Establishment-acceptable route that change is to take.
Remember that all change ultimately comes from the people taking action, and that the cops will lie through their teeth about the people taking action if it threatens the status quo. This point is especially important to remember on this day especially, because bastards like Bull Connor and George Wallace lied through their teeth about Dr. King’s courageous actions like the Selma-to-Montgomery Marches, the March on Washington, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Don’t believe what the Establishment says about an Occupy camp. Go down, talk to the people there, and make a decision for yourself.
For context, La Senza is a subsidiary of Limited Brands that specializes in high end underwear and lingerie, similar to Victoria’s Secret. The workers in question were basically fired in a snap after La Senza UK filed for bankruptcy. Through some legal fuckery, La Senza was restructuring in a way that would allow them to reduce the amount of money it owed in wages already earned by sales associates for their hard work. These women weren’t going to take this news without a fight, nor were they going to wait for a legal system slanted against them to make its decision. Several workers took over their now-empty stores in protest, and occupied them for all of a day and a half until the bankruptcy administrator announced that they would be paid their back wages.
This story echoes the success of the Republic Windows And Doors occupation in late 2008. In both cases, workers getting screwed out of wages and severances took over their former jobsite and held it until they got satisfaction. While both stories are inspiring, the La Senza story is especially inspiring to me, as I work in the service sector. To see people working a similar job to myself undertaking a collective action that would protect their interests stirs my heart and gives me hope that such tactics can be used to boost wages, restore cuts to hours, and end abusive practices by management.
This is what I was talking about when I discussed occupying closed workplaces in this post. The actions of the La Senza workers in the Liffey Valley are exactly the kind of thing needed to get society working for average people again and not the wealthy. Now I’m waiting on fired workers to take over a shuttered workplace and start it back up again. That’s the next inflection point, the shift from occupation to reclamation, and it will be beautiful to see when it comes.
State governments have taken a number of different steps to balance their books in recent years. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (remember him?) proposed a new tax on strip clubs, for example, and a Utah state rep. suggested saving $60 million per year by abolishing the 12th grade. But no proposal struck as much metaphorical gold as Arizona’s decision to sell off the state capitol (and a whole bunch of other state properties, such as maximum security prisons) for $735 million in 2009. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed off on the deal, and the state now leases the House and Senate chambers from a private real estate company at a considerable long-term cost.
The best part? Arizona sold the building for $81 million dollars and is having to buy it back for $105 million. So, not including the money they spent on leasing the building from the private company they sold the capital to, Arizona’s highly right-wing government just gave $21 million dollars to this company and gained precisely nothing for it. This story is a microcosm for privatization of public services overall: it always costs more money and you don’t get any better service in return for the extra money spent. Oh, and it’s also worth noting that this government’s run by the hard-right wing of the Republican party, y’know, the ones that are supposed to be ‘fiscally responsible’.
Privatization doesn’t save tax payers money whether it’s prisons, schools, or health care for the elderly. A prime example of what the public sector can do is the closure of I-405 in LA in July. The I-405 closure was done by state and municipal authorities and finished under budget and ahead of time. Compare that to the I-540 loop here in North Carolina, where you have several contractors fired over the years and the project so staggeringly over budget that twenty years on from when ground first broke on the project the government is going to have to switch the rest of the expressway to a toll road to pay for finishing it. Of course, they’ve already selected a company to run the toll collection system, because trusting the private sector to do public sector work has gone so well on this project already.
I defy anyone to find a single successful example of privatization of a public service, with success defined as either saved money while maintaining service or improved service while costing the same. If you find a success, let me know in the comments. I’ll be waiting.
Last week, more than six years after Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency began mailing out notices to victims of the storm that ripped through the Gulf region. The message: Give us our money back.
FEMA is asking more than 83,000 recipients of aid to reimburse the government an average of $4,622 each, BlackAmericaWeb reports. The agency says that clerical or employee errors may have resulted in some victims receiving more compensation than what may now be allocated.
David Bellinger, a 63-year-old legally blind former New Orleans resident who moved to Atlanta after his home was leveled by the storm, said he “nearly had a stroke” when he received his $3,200 bill, with 30 days to pay. “I’m totally blind; I subsist entirely on a Social Security disability check. If I have to pay this money back, it would pretty much wipe out all the savings I have.”
I don’t know even to say about this that doesn’t reduce me to angrily sputtering an excessive amount of profanity. These people have suffered enough already. New Orleans is gradually being turned into a Disney version of its previous self that includes much fewer poor folk and minorities, and these people who have had their communities and support network shredded by the storm, the flooding, and the evacuation all across the United States have suffered enough. These folk had to get their feet again in strange cities in the middle of the worst economic crisis since 1929. If they got a bit more cash than they were supposed to through no fault of their own, LET THEM KEEP IT. Hell, it will probably do more to stimulate the economy than any of the tax cuts Obama has put through.
I don’t know why this is even being considered as an option. Someone should have considered exactly how shit-awful it’d look when this went out. It’s good to know that FEMA continues its tradition of incompetence no matter who is in the White House.
On Tuesday, his last day in office, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi granted full and unconditional pardons to 193 criminals — an unusually high number for the state, and one that is likely to inflame controversy about Mr. Barbour’s pardon practices.
The governor’s outgoing pardons had attracted an outcry when it was revealed that he had pardoned five people last week who had been convicted of murder and had worked at the governor’s mansion while in custody, performing odd jobs.
Other Mississippi governors have issued full pardons to people convicted of murder — Kirk Fordice, for example, issued two such pardons before he left office in 2000 after two terms — but none have issued so many pardons to so many criminals.
Like his fellow Republican George Ryan, who declared a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, Haley Barbour, the outgoing Governor of Mississippi, decided to do something humane as he exited office. Barbour’s actions are significant, but the furor about this action is far more significant as it reveals a fact about the American polity that most people knowledgeable about the prison system have known for a long time: Americans have forgotten why we punish people in the first place.
The founding text of the American prison system is Cesare Beccaria‘s On Crimes and Punishment. Jefferson quoted from it heavily, as did Adams. The gist of Beccaria’s thesis is that it’s not the harshness of the punishment that acts as the deterrent to crime, but rather the certainty of getting caught, and excessively harsh punishments can cause criminals to commit more severe crimes than they otherwise would. Beccaria put it best when he wrote, “If an equal punishment be ordained for two crimes that injure society in different degrees, there is nothing to deter men from committing the greater as often as it is attended with greater advantage.”
The point of punishment is to correct someone who has gone astray. Harsh prison conditions and long sentences don’t fix the problem of crime because they rarely bother with the necessary programs for that rehabilitation. Given the harsh conditions within American prisons and our high recidivism rates, I think this statement bears out as true. Look at the rest of the industrialized world, and you will see a much lower recidivism rate and much milder prisons than the ones in the United States. Long sentences in terrible prisons doesn’t have most people leaving prison even able to turn over a new leaf, much less willing.
Then there’s the fact of how our prisons reflect on us as a people. As Montesqueiu wrote, “every punishment which does not arise from absolute necessity is tyrannical.” Is it absolutely necessary for punishment to make places like Pelican Bay and San Quentin and Ossining into hellholes out of which no person returns whole and normal? No? Then what we are doing is tyrannical, wrong, and unconstitutional, and it needs to change.
For Barbour, it likely means the end of his national political career, as any attempt for further office in this country would likely be met with ads similar to those run against Dukakis in 1988 by Bush about Willie Horton. This doesn’t make me sad, given Barbour’s policy stances and his recollection of the White Citizens’ Council, but I do have to applaud his courage to do something this courageous on his way out.
Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents hold this view; a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans do as well. For historical perspective, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view in a 1941 Gallup poll.
Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say that the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy; just 36% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and 61% of independents share this view. In contrast, a majority (58%) of Republicans say that the system is generally fair to most Americans.
Even if the media is right and Occupy is on its way down, it means the movement is coming off the field having not finished its work, which means there’s an opening for further efforts to emerge and take shape. Income inequality and the enthrallment of the political system to the employing class aren’t issues that have been resolved. Even if Occupy is flickering out and lacks sufficient support, these polls mean that Occupy’s organizational shape was insufficient for the task ahead of it and not that there isn’t a sizable amount of agreement with the general energy behind the movement.
As I’ve said before, Occupy is, to me, a transitional form. It might have been impossible for it to be a permanent structure, but Occupy is a fantastic way to get the discussion going right now about the past twenty-five years of neoliberalism and how it has ruined lives. The organizations that start to chop down the problems choking our society will have to, at least initially, take relatively conventional forms like industrial unions and (to a lesser extent, in my opinion) political parties. This won’t always be the case as society is changed to be more participatory in nature, but at the start it will be absolutely necessary because these organizational forms have a proven track record of engendering change.
In any event, I’m waiting to see how the media covers these polls and what it will mean for the political campaigns ahead. The answers to those questions are probably, “they won’t,” and, “nothing,” but a man can hope.
A Brief Reminder That Reformism Doesn’t Work
Posted: January 26, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, commentary, politics, socialism, the economy | Tags: anticapitalism, labor, labor union, neoliberalism, occupy wall street, organizing, privatization, public policy, reformism, socialism | Leave a comment »I didn’t write this but I really, really wish I had.
Everyone under the age of thirty who is underemployed should be forced to read this whole piece, because it quite accurately crystallizes a fair chunk of my thinking on the current economic situation. We are all supremely fucked, and there isn’t a way out of this mess within the existing system, and what’s more I think more and more of my generation realize this, whereas our parents and Gen X don’t. When talking about these political issues with my parents, there is a reformist streak to their solutions. If we elect the right politicians, things will get fixed eventually. If the employing class can just be shamed sufficiently, they will do the right thing.
They aren’t idiots, far from it, and they are also far from being alone in falling into that kind of trap. Reformism and gradualism are basically ways to reduce the impact of the problems being created by neoliberal capitalism so that people don’t actually get pissed enough to solve the root issue, and that’s capitalism itself. Reformist programs like welfare is treating the symptom and not the cause, and so long as people treat it as a legitimate alternative to actual revolutionary change, we’ll be back in this mess even if a robust welfare state gets pushed through, be it five years from now or five decades from now. Nothing frustrates me more than otherwise decent and honest people saying, “we have to work through the system first before we try anything else,” because we’ve already tried working through the system and it’s failed miserably. It was called the post-war era, and virtually every single program implemented then is under a sustained attack now. You doubt this? Look at the entire austerity hysteria sweeping the West and then talk to me.
You have the UK Tories dismantling the welfare state and the NHS bit by bit and the Labour party sitting by and half-heartedly endorsing their actions. You have the Canadian Tories starting the pull apart their universal health care system by starting to privatize it. You have Social Security and Medicare under threat as Democrats have endorsed plans that amount to the demise of those two programs. And these are only the most visible examples. You give me twenty minutes and I’ll turn up more, because there’s always more and it’s always worse. Oh, and in most cases, the groups doing the biggest damage to these programs are usually the ones that implemented them a generation and a half ago.
The fact of the matter is that the programs like Social Security, Medicare, and labor protections were compromises that only came into being because there were a lot of folk who had learned how to fight between 1941-45 and weren’t about to come back to a Depression-era existence. The people running the show realized this, and gave some ground realizing that it could be clawed back later on down the road. So they gave ground, didn’t fight too hard against Medicare or Social Security, and negotiated decent contracts with labor unions once those institutions had been purged of most of their radicals. These compromises gave birth to the American ‘middle class’ mindset, and ultimately neutered any chance for genuinely radical ideas to gain any traction within the body politic.
Until the latest crisis, which has shown an upswing of interest in economic models that are genuinely democratic and egalitarian in nature. Hopefully the Millennials don’t fall into the trap our grandparents fell into and start to push for genuine change to the way society is organized, because otherwise nothing will get better.
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