Title: Our Was The Shining Future
Rating: 4 Stars
This book is about the American Dream and how we lost it.
First, the American Dream. Leonhardt’s thesis is that a basic tenet of American life is that the current generation has always had it better than the previous one. This is a pretty common belief and is thought to be the reason why Americans historically have seemed more optimistic than citizens of other nations.
This is one of my issues with this book. Simply put, I don’t really believe it. Maybe it’s fairer to say that I haven’t seen compelling evidence that has convinced me. As Leonhardt himself admits, there simply has never been any long running, multi-generational, longitudinal studies that could be used to prove this, one way or the other. There is simply no way to systemically prove that adults living in 1840 had a materially improved life than their parents living in 1820.
The Census Bureau has released anonymized data dating back to the 1940s. With this data and armed with sophisticated data analysis, sociologist/statisticians have made a compelling case that the generation of Americans after 1980 are living comparatively more difficult lives than the generation that lived from 1940 to 1970. He uses that information to claim that the American dream is dead or, at least, on life support.
Here’s the thing. I’ve written about this before but in my opinion the period of time spanning 1940 through 1970 is an anomaly. Having just survived a depression, the US economy was on the verge of an explosion. Also, with the advent of World War II, the US became the global supplier of war materials. US manufacturing during the war grew at an almost unfathomable rate. With so much of the economy focused on the war effort, there was tremendous pent up consumption supply, just waiting to be unleashed when the war ended. If all of that was not enough, Japan was destroyed. Germany was destroyed. The Soviet Union was in a perilous state. Much of Europe was barely able to feed itself, let alone be an economic competitor. The US was truly a colossus relative to the other nations. Until the countries recovered, a recovery that would take decades, and oh yeah, was powered by US manufacturing, the US simply stood alone. It only stands to reason that, given all of those advantages, that the American standard of living would dramatically increase.
Even so, given that, how did we lose the plot? After all, since 1980, income growth has been stagnant for most of the population. Most of the wealth that’s been accumulated has gone to the wealthiest elite. Our life expectancy is significantly lower than other nations. Our healthcare costs are skyrocketing. We are one of six nations that has no national paid parental leave (the other being the mighty nations of Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga). We have tens of millions of Americans who think (according to recently published surveys) that we might need an authoritarian government.
What happened?
First of all, Leonhardt did acknowledge that the world caught up to us. It was inevitable. In fact, with the Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, and our willingness to open up trade to China, we actively played a part in that. The relative disparity between us and the rest of the world was bound to close.
He lists three other factors.
One was the development of the New Left. Starting with the Port Huron Statement in the early 1960s, the progressive movement shifted its primary focus from economic gains to civil rights gains. This, obviously, is not a bad thing. Subsequently we have had an explosion of gains in rights. People of color, women, LGBTQIA+, and the disabled all have more rights and visibility than they did sixty years ago. That’s to be celebrated.
In so doing, the progressive movement took their eye off of the economic ball. They minimized their outreach to unions. Not only that, but members of the unions were generally more conservative. I’ve written about this before, but many of the union members of that time were veterans of World War II and of the Korean War. Having risked their lives for their country, they were unsurprisingly deeply patriotic. The New Left’s demonstration against the Vietnam War seemed to such men as being unpatriotic. Being predominately white men, civil rights wasn’t an issue that was going to inspire mass support.
The New Left leadership skewed younger and its actions were directed, to a large extent, towards the college educated. Especially in the 1960s, when acquiring a college education was still relatively rare, this emphasis led to even more of a narrowing of support.
The second development was the rise of men like Robert Bork. Starting in the 1930s, liberal ideas were dominant. There was little competition from conservative voices. For years, economic libertarians toiled away in relative obscurity at places like the University of Chicago. Now with an opening due to the missteps of the New Left, corporate funds and wealthy benefactors donated millions to set up institutes to give voice to their conservative beliefs.
They were very anti-regulation. They were deeply suspicious of any governmental interference in business. As long as monopolies reduced prices, they should be allowed. After all, if a monopoly were to unfairly raise prices, this would only open it up for competition, right? They had an almost messianic belief in the infallible nature of a free market.
Robert Bork and Lewis Powell were the two main evangelists for this school. Powell ended up on the Supreme Court. Bork was nominated but his views were so extreme that he was denied the nomination (all future such denials were to be called being ‘Borked’).
Their views ended up carrying the day. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President. Being an eternal optimist, he was able to put a rosy glow on conservative principles. After all, according to their theory, lowering taxes causes more economic activity which generates more income so that tax receipts will actually increase. You can have your cake and eat it too! Even Democrats drank some of that Kool-Aid. Clinton ran as a neo-liberal, saying that the era of big government was over.
From 1980 to 2020, we discovered how misguided this economic theory was. With unions in decline, wages stagnated. Corporations got so large that they can charge whatever they want. They’re so large that they can destroy any other company that tries to enter their space. It’s been estimated that $3000 of annual income has been transferred from individuals to corporations. Wealth inequality is worse than it was even during the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century.
The third development was immigration. The immigration act that was passed in 1924 was deeply racist, strictly limiting immigration from non-White nations (and when I say non-White, I’m including nations such as Greece and Italy). The Immigration Act of 1965 changed that. Instead of nation by nation quotas, there was one number of total immigrants that would be allowed. We would only allow immigrants with a specific set of skills and those with families already in country. By keeping this low limit, this would protect American working class jobs.
There was only one problem. In the final draft of the bill, that total number only applied to immigrants with the special skill sets. There was no absolute number for the family member immigration. This opened the flood gates. Millions of immigrants ended up coming to the US. Millions of them took working class jobs, driving down labor rates.
That’s one thing that I never really understood. Before 1965, since immigration had been so restricted previously, we really were a Black and white nation. Obviously, there were Asians and Hispanics, but their numbers before 1965 were very small. In the early 1960s, only 4% of Americans were foreign born. Decades later, that percentage is now 14%.
Since the New Left is consistently supportive of civil rights (which, again, is a good thing), they are typically pro immigration. If you’re a working class person seeing your wages stagnate as people that don’t look like you work for less pay, you’re not going to be amused when a university educated intellectual lectures you about the benefits of immigration.
If there is optimism, it’s that our country’s beliefs have a tendency to swing like a pendulum. If the 1930s to 1970s was a time of liberal progress and the 1980s to the 2010s was a conservative reaction, there are signs that perhaps things are starting to swing back a bit. Even though a small percentage of Americans belong to unions, support at least for the concept of unions is increasing. Leonhardt holds up as an ideal the tough, pragmatic liberalism of Robert F Kennedy. In no way am I comparing him to RFK, but Biden’s approach is more focused on unions and the working class than either Obama or Clinton were. An ironic side effect of living through a pandemic and the resulting trillion dollar stimulus packages is that a good slice of wealth inequality has been removed.
Who knows, maybe the next thirty or so years will be another flowering of worker’s rights and gains.
dorkenstein 