When right-wing Roy Moore said that the time when America was great was during slavery, he revealed something key to the current GOP members of Congress and state legislatures–their primary goal is to return to a time when owners of property held all the keys to the kingdom and workers were just serfs expected to do as told and whose lives didn’t really matter much to the boss capitalists.
Historian Nancy MacLean suggests that this is the reason for the tax bill’s largesse to corporatists and the wealthy, the reason the GOP wants to undo Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and essentially all the progressive programs introduced in the twentieth century to form the basis for a thriving middle class and surging democratic union. See Cahuncey DeVega, Historian Nancy MacLean on the right’s ultimate goal: rolling back the 20th century, Salon.com (Dec. 13, 2017).
Here are some key points from the article.
1) “[T]he Democratic Party is terrible at translating complex questions of public policy into simple narratives that evoke emotion and, in turn, action from the American people.” Id.
Indeed, having an able, sympathetic messenger who can translate the issues that truly matter into terms that make sense to ordinary people is something the Democratic Party lacked in the last election. The tone deafness of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and, much of the time, Hillary Clinton, meant that ordinary people didn’t understand that Trump is merely a blowhard capitalist who doesn’t care if he cheats or lies or exploits other people so long as he gets notoriety and money, while the Democrats have been the party working for a decent sustainable economy, environmental protection and preservation, protection from pollution and diseases, and working wages for ordinary folk.
The GOP, on the other hand, has mastered the art of lying to the point that they can pat themselves on the back for fooling the majority of the people the majority of the time, while blaming anything that goes wrong on Democrats (even when it is–most of the time–entirely GOP policy that the ‘wrong’ occur). So a tax bill that enriches the oligarchs and ultimately raises taxes on the ordinary people is exactly what they have in mind, but they rush it through without any public hearings and discussion because they don’t want people to realize it.
2) The GOP tax “reform” bill is intended to create a deficit that will justify “huge automatic cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid”, to be followed by a “push for a constitutional convention, at which the No. 1 agenda item will be a balanced budget amendment” with the goal ultimately of privatizing Social Security.
MacLean calls this Ayn Rand-brand of hateful thinking followed by GOP House majority leader Paul Ryan “economic eugenics”. Since the GOP right-wing libertarians believe that only people who are successful have any merit, they are comfortable “inflict[ing] harm on other people. At its most basic, this libertarian moral system says that it would be better for people to die than to get health care financed by government from taxes paid by others.”
3)The GOP emphasis on voter fraud (and consequent efforts across the country to make it harder for people to register to vote or to actually vote) allows the oligarch-led anti-democratic movement to disregard the will of the people because they have “gamed the system to maintain power.”
The majority of Americans opposed the tax bill that almost every single Republican representative and senator voted for (no Democrat voted in either house of Congress to support the GOP tax scam). But the GOP legislators think they can ignore what the voters want, because they have held discussions behind closed doors, and are “using the power of national government to prevent voters in more progressive lcoalities and states from being able to choose more progressive policies” by enacting a bill that penalizes voters living in high-tax, progressive states that actually already send more money to low-tax, economically suffering “red” states.
MacLean notes that George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, funded by Charles Koch, has been leveraging universities for their political project of undoing progressiivism for decades. They think people will be “absorbed with Facebook and binge-watching Netflix” so will disregard the way that the GOP and their oligarchic allies are using the national government to return to the late 19th century when oligarchs with property had all the power. That’s what is the “stealth nature of this tax bill.” Returning to a world where “only the wealthy were doing well and everybody else was screwed”, a world preferred by James Buchanana, who “devised the playbook that the Koch network is using.”
This tax legislation is, indeed, class warfare. It represents a huge blow in favor of wealthy corporatists though creation of a gaping $1.5 trillion deficit hole that will be used by the GOP to decimate New Deal and Great Society programs on which most ordinary Americans depend –Medicaid to pay for nursing homes in the last years of life, Medicare to help afford needed medical care, Social Security to make up for the gap between the meager savings in retirement plans and the increasing costs of living after retirement. These wealthy people in Congress just don’t give a damn for ordinary working Americans, whether black or white, rural or urban, “conservative” or “liberal”. All they care about is making sure that people with property have even more property. It has nothing to do with creating or promoting a sustainable economy that will lift ordinary workers stagnated wages. It has everything to do with appeasing the top one percent.
Linda:
I believe this to be mostly correct;
Indeed, having an able, sympathetic messenger who can translate the issues that truly matter into terms that make sense to ordinary people is something the Democratic Party lacked in the last election. The tone deafness of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and, much of the time, Hillary Clinton, meant that ordinary people didn’t understand that Trump is merely a blowhard capitalist who doesn’t care if he cheats or lies or exploits other people so long as he gets notoriety and money, while the Democrats have been the party working for a decent sustainable economy, environmental protection and preservation, protection from pollution and diseases, and working wages for ordinary folk.
Dems have done us a disservice in not being able to communicate in terms many people could understand, relate to, and embrace.
Yet the Gilded age was one where the average person was better off in 1900 than in 1870. It was the period of the great deflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation which meant the cost of everything was in general dropping 2% per year in the us. A large part of this at least for folks in larger cities was the integration of the US into essentially 1 market from several markets as most larger cities had at least 2 railroad groups serving them. I recall reading that in general estate inventories in 1900 show more goods than those in 1870. Just a bit outside this time frame My grandparents bought a farm in 1910 and build a new house. The house on the property was a 2 room house that was turned into a coal shed and wash house. The new house had 6 rooms plus a root cellar. (Still off grid of course because this was in the country)
this period was one of both rapid adoption of technologies developed in the first 1/2 of the 19th century, (railroad, telegraph, steamship) and the development and implementation of new technologies (auto, telephone, electricity, etc) See Creating the 20th century by Smil for details.
Of course some folks lost because they could no longer compete with imported goods, One example I have read is that up to 1869 a lot of furniture was built in Utah because it was so hard to get stuff there, The Union Pacific solved the problem and the local furniture makers found a new line of work.
So in general life was better in the US in 1900 than 1870 and things did at least then trickle down.
This was the period of the great deflation where the cost of living was declining about 2% a year:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation And this document from the department of labor from 1898 listing wages shows roughly flat wages over that time (depending on the field although some went up (locomotive engineers went up 25% in this period for example) https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/scribd/?toc_id=498267&filepath=/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_v03_0018_1898.pdf&start_page=10
So it appears that if you look at unbiased statistics of the time a rising tide back then did lift all boats, even as a few got extremely rich, and as a result inequality increased.
Neoliberalism actually means restoration of Gilded Age on a new level. So the return to Gilded Age commenced not now, but with the election of Reagan, or slightly earlier. Trump actually professed “bastard neoliberalism” (neoliberalism without neoliberal globalizations).
Election of Trump IMHO signified the deep crisis of neoliberalism and loss of legitimacy of neoliberal elite in the USA. That’s why Trump was elected and Hillary was not.
The fact that Trump quickly betrayed all his election promises does not change this. We saw such tricks before. He just proved that he is Republican Obama. Much less slick in that, but still belonging to the same brand of “change we can believe in” snake oil salesmen.
The key problem here is that as the neoliberal elite feels less and less secure at home it tries to suppress dissent with rampant jingoism (look at Trumps National security strategy) and Russophobia:
== quote ==
“China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence. At the same time, the dictatorships of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran are determined to destabilize regions, threaten Americans and our allies, and brutalize their own people.”
=== end of quote ===
That’s why we have the current neo-McCarthyism campaign. The goal is to both to rally the nation around the flag rather than turning against the government, and to suppress the growing dissent by conflating it with pro-Russian sentiments. Turing the majority of US public and public opinion against Russian government. Along with the attempt to swipe Hillary Clinton fiasco and the corruption of DNC (and now the corruption of FBI which suppressed “emailgate”) which pushed Sanders under the bus by illegal means. .
My impression is that while there is no clear alternative to neoliberalism as a social system, the growth and success of far-right movement both in Europe and the USA means that people badly want an alternative, whatever it can be. Even if this is far right nationalism.