I was an individual. College graduates tend to think of themselves that way, younger ones all the more, younger Baby Boomers at the time probably the most ever.
And the intensified, all-encompassing individualism that blew up during the s— I do my thing, and you do your thing— was not a mindset or temperament that necessarily reinforced feelings of solidarity with fellow workers or romantic feelings about unions. What happened with organized labor in journalism during the s is an excellent illustration of those early days of the deepening fracture between upper-middle-class and lower-middle-class white Americans. It encompasses both the cultural split yuppies versus yahoos and the introduction of transformative technology in the workplace.
Between the publication of the Pentagon Papers in through the end of Watergate in , The Washington Post became a celebrated national institution, sexy liberalism incarnate. Following immediately on those two heroic achievements was another milestone episode, not very celebrated or heroic but likewise emblematic of the moment. In the spring of , the journalists of the Post went out on strike—bumblingly. Read: Organized labor's growing class divide. It was a generation before websites and browsers, universal PCs and cell phones, 30 years before print dailies entered their death spiral, but technology was already changing newspapers in a big way, in the manufacturing part of the operation.
Owners were eliminating typographers, who operated obsolete, elephantine Brazil -meets— Willy Wonka linotype machines that turned molten lead into blocks of type, and they also wanted to pay fewer people to operate the printing presses.
We know Kissinger, too. Yet because it was a newspaper management that broke the strike, no other newspaper has touched it properly, or even whimpered a protest.
W hen I arrived at Time as a writer five years later, I went out of my way to produce copy the modern way—abandoning my office Selectric to use one of the special computer terminals crammed into a special little room, holed up with a few of the other young writers.
That technology presently enabled the company to eliminate the jobs of the people downstairs who were employed to retype our stories. I think that if I had been one of those unionized craft workers who were abandoned by my unionized journalist colleagues 45 years ago, I would have watched journalists getting washed away and drowned by the latest wave of technology-induced creative destruction over the past 15 years with some schadenfreude.
News stories about labor now tended to be framed this way rather than that way or were not covered at all. Thus like most Democratic politicians at the same time, media people became enablers of the national change in perspective from left to right concerning economics. A huge new cohort of college-educated liberal professionals got co-opted. My political coming of age coincided neatly with this process of assimilation. He was the most liberal, most antiwar candidate for the Democratic nomination.
Read: The gallant idealism of George McGovern. Immediately after the wipeout, Hart launched his own political candidacy, for a U. Senate seat in Colorado. The Vietnam War and its cultural effects had made leaders and members of unions dislike McGovern, but as a child of the Depression and a former history professor, he had totally been on their side concerning the whole point of unions—maximizing worker power versus corporate power.
I felt some affinity for this new, youthy, college-educated political wing—as I felt at the time for postmodern architecture and New Wave music. I was in my 20s, so partly it was the sheer hubris of the young, rejecting the older generation because it was old. Rather, it was a term proudly self-applied by a certain kind of U.
The new approach propagated rapidly. Soon almost every up-and-coming national Democratic politician was a New Democrat: Hart, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, Bill Bradley, Al Gore, Bob Kerrey, Bill Clinton—all first elected senator or governor between and when they were in their 30s, all about to become serious presidential candidates. For two generations, liberals had been in control of the government and the news media and the culture, so it seemed as if that hegemony afforded them the luxury of true liberalism—admitting mistakes, cutting some slack for the other side, trying new approaches.
For 44 of the previous 48 years, Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress, and they had also held the presidency for most of that half century. All through the s, when the GOP had only about a third of Senate seats, a third of that small Republican minority were bona fide liberals.
Of course good-faith compromise and consensus between left and right were possible. Which helps explain why almost nobody foresaw fully the enormity of the sharp turn America was about to take. Liberals were ill-prepared to appreciate or cope with what was about to happen. Modern liberals prided ourselves on entertaining all sorts of disparate policy ideas for improving the world, whereas the economic right really has one big, simple idea: Do everything possible and anything necessary to let the rich stay rich and get richer, and big business to stay big and powerful and get more so.
Most liberals, like most Americans, preferred not to regard capitalists as categorically rapacious and amoral, or to imagine the U. That seemed crude. And to some degree, most liberals succumbed, like most Americans, to a new form of economic nostalgia that was being revived and popularized—the notion that market forces are practically natural forces with which we dare not tinker or tamper too much.
Starting in the s, the Milton Friedman Doctrine, the righteous pursuit of maximum profit to the exclusion of absolutely everything else, freed and encouraged businesspeople and the rich to be rapacious and amoral without shame. I feel sorry for Schumpeter, who died in , because three decades after his death, with the rise of newfangled old-fashioned free-market mania, he got famous when that phrase was revived and reduced to a meme, repeated endlessly to explain and justify the sudden obsolescence of blue-collar production workers and then the lesser white-collar workers.
We liberals had heard of Schumpeter, and we knew a bit about the industrial revolutions at the turns of the previous two centuries, and had learned in college to take it as a truism that painful transitions like these were just how history and economic progress inevitably unfolded, and that after a difficult patch—for the actual, you know, workers , in what we started calling the Rust Belt—things would sort themselves out.
That long view, however, tended to omit the history that had made the previous industrial revolutions come out okay in America—the countervailing forces that took a century to build, all the laws and rules and unions and other organizations created to protect citizens and workers and keep the system reasonably fair and balanced. And it was exactly this web of countervailing forces that, at exactly that moment, were being systematically dismantled by the right. By the s, unions had been reduced to desperate parochial struggles to save jobs in declining heavy industries and, as mistrust of government grew, to unionizing more government employees.
In response to economic Reaganism, liberals were committed to preserving the social-welfare status quo for old people and the deserving poor, and to convincing America that Democrats were now modern and pragmatic , not wasteful bleeding-heart suckers or childish protesters or comsymp fools. Very few believed anymore that a term FDR used in his Economic Bill of Rights, unreasonable profits , could even be a thing.
Daniel Markovits: How McKinsey destroyed the middle class. He's made marks of them all. People will say Trump is just another demagogue, a sophist with a talent for self-promotion. Or that's he a vacuous populist who craftily tapped into the zeitgeist.
Or that other presidential candidates have succeeded without, shall we say, an understanding of the issues. But that understates Trump's significance.
Take Ronald Reagan. He exploded onto the political scene in the early 80s, and was famously ignorant by presidential standards. As I noted in November, Reagan's list of doltish quotes is long and impressive.
But he won over the country with superficial appeals and a generic handsomeness. Trump's no Reagan, however. Reagan at least gave eloquent speeches studded with flowery rhetoric and serious-sounding aims. He was, after all, an actor who could read a script prepared by someone else with impeccable flair. Trump isn't half the orator Reagan was, and he doesn't need to be.
Trump has decided that voters are so clueless, so delirously angry, that feigned bigotry and empty promises to "make America great again" will do — no specifics needed. And he's obviously right. Debate after debate, speech after speech, Trump has personified the anti-intellectualism percolating in this country for decades.
Is there any doubt it's working? He may be cynical, but he isn't wrong. To be sure, the media shares some of the blame here. In an essay worth reading, Matt Taibbi lamented the decline of cable news. This sign violates the literal law where you are supposed to stay indoors due to a global pandemic.
And lastly Guess there really is no cure for stupidity. Tags american covidiots covidiots covidiots india.
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