And the Times Yet to Come

[Note to Readers: I often write things that I just file for a while and then dredge out of the files months and sometimes years later and decide it is worth saying after all. This is one of those pieces, perhaps a little repetitive of recent posts, but I think worth putting up. —tnqog]

I'm writing this at the very end of September 2012. Before I talk about what I think is to come I think it would help to explain my thinking if I made a few historical comments.

The saving grace of our American society has been the resilience of the system of government created at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Itself the result of compromises and political deals, such as the infamous 3/5 of a person rule, and flawed by the omissions that had to be remedied with the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments; it has allowed our country to grow and develop and afford our citizens one of the highest generalized standards of living in the world. On its foundation we have "promoted the general welfare" through landmarks such as the labor legislation of the thirties, Brown v. Kansas on school segregation, Civil Rights legislation in the sixties. We have also fought a terrible civil war that killed the equivalent in today's terms of 6 or 7 million Americans [Drew Faust "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War"].

Alas if certain current members of the Supreme Court had their way we would freeze the document in some imagined state of how things were in 1787. The "Originalists" miss entirely the genius of Madison and his colleagues and what they created. How smart people can be so stupid escapes me, but then I realize they are "dumb like a fox," as my mother used to say, and are simply making up the doctrine to support their prejudices.

The "Republic," as it came to be called in the great war that nearly divided it, has always steered on erratic course. A teacher I once had claimed that Mencken (or somebody) described Democracy as a raft that could not be steered in a straight line. So it has been. Justice Taney, fifth Chief Justice, brought us that great war with the aid of Harriet Beecher Stowe ("Uncle Tom's Cabin"). Taney by the infamous Dred Scott decision, Stowe by her lurid descriptions of the lot of the enslaved. Truth was the country was slowly turning away from the institution as least in its thinking. Few in the South were slave holders and Taney himself manumitted his slaves. The slave economy could not have stood much longer, but the leaders of some states were prepared to leave the Republic over what they termed a matter of principle. Any echoes of the conservative "principles" of "values voters?"

The institutions lagged opinion much as we see today over the issue of same-sex marriage and "Don't ask, don't tell."

The structure is resilient, but it is designed to be slow to change. The contention between branches is a brake on rapid radical change. In the late fifties and early sixties it took Freedom Rides, the Montgomery Bus Boycott,  Birmingham Church bombing and exposure of Bull Conner as the racist agent of a white power elite, the Selma march, and finally the march on Washington to move the administration to act. And even then it took a second administration to get it done on the dead body of the leader of the first.

The most rapid changes seem to occur when someone gets into a position of power who either was not expected to (Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, Clinton) or who betrays his history or class (FDR, Earl Warren). Lincoln was elected by a minority in a four way race and faced secession before he took office. War powers enabled him to act in ways that he could not have done otherwise. The first Roosevelt took office after the assassination of McKinley and took on the big business trusts that had come to dominate America. The late 1800s was not a good time in the Republic. Violence against organizing workers was endemic. Corporations were made the primary beneficiaries of the 14th Amendment (yep, defined as "persons"—the law is a strange beast). The rich were getting richer, and the poor, poorer. One utopian novel (Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward") described the society as a carriage being pulled by a toiling hundred while a few rode and another small group scrambled and fought for places on the top of the coach..

TR's handpicked successor promptly sold the Republic back to the corporations.

Then the devil's deal was made to trade off booze for income taxes and the possibility of women's suffrage, and we got the "Roaring Twenties," and organized crime and unrestrained speculation on Wall Street. The inevitable collapse put an end to the political career of "The Great Engineer," but before that happened we had a few lovely twists. Immigration was a hot issue then, too; and what we were afraid of were "anarchists" and the first "Red Scare." The Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 exacerbated the downward economic spiral.

FDR was elected in a landslide unmatched until 1972, and came into a devastated economy and pursued aggressive legislation and executive actions to change it. With 57% of the popular vote and an electoral college majority of 472 to 59, he used his mandate to pursue policies that those of his class had and continue to have problems with. He was slowed by court decisions in the mid thirties, and by a conservative congressional coalition. What remains is the SEC, FDIC, Social Security, and significant elements of his labor legislation giving working people more rights to organize. Some of the latter has been vitiated by subsequent legislation (Taft-Hartley and Norris-La Guardia) but it still remains part of his legacy.

Truman, succeeding FDR who died in office, was able to integrate the armed forces and implement the Marshall Plan, which may have been the single greatest contribution to the well being of the world economy and relative peace in the next three decades.

I won't continue to belabor this, but what I see is a country that has been slow to change during much of its history, unless events forced it, with institutions that had some tendency to preserve the status quo; punctuated by events that enabled or called for somewhat more radical change. certainly not enough to satisfy a real leftist, but liberalizing nonetheless. Birth control of any kind, condoms included, was illegal in Connecticut as recently as the sixties. Significant print censorship ended in the early sixties. Now the internet has thoroughly let the dogs out. Both Eisenhower and Nixon legitimized the new social deal of FDR and did not attempt to roll it back.

The new conservative movement of the last four decades is  something of another story, though their success at overturning things has been muted. They have nibbled away like rats at Roe v Wade, severely limiting the availability of safe legal abortions in more conservative states, but they haven't turned it over. The culture war battles over things like prayer in schools have been a lightning rod for the discontent of the religious right, but they can't get the genie all the way back in the bottle. That's probably what makes them so rabid.

The danger I see for the future appears invisible to many Americans. We know it is going on but it is only in our face when scads of money dump into our elections. It is the corporate ownership of the institutions of government. It is the revolving door between Goldman Sachs and the Treasury and Federal Reserve. It is the congressman/congressional staffer to lobbyist career path. It is the hundreds of lobbyists for each congressperson. It is Citizens United.

The corporations control our government and by extension, us, while they try to put us to sleep with all the little goodies we can get as long as we don't get laid off.

I think there are two paths in front of us. The one where we all just become quiet little sheep and it gets done to us. [Let you in on a secret, the 1% want the 47% to be dependent and without initiative--kind of like the invading armies killing off the priests and intellectuals to eliminate resistance.]

The other, and I am hoping/thinking more likely, is that Citizens United becomes the straw.

The engine of a successfully economy and society is the middle class. People who want better for themselves and are willing to work to get it in a system that rewards and treats them fairly are what can make us a successful and healthy society. Income inequality like we have now (and had at the end of the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties) is ultimately not sustainable.

The only question is how bad will it have to get before it gets better.