What hath Reagan wrought? Part One

Ronald Reagan visiting the General Electric plant in Schenectady, NY, circa 1954.

The economy’s getting better, and it still stinks.

It will get even better, and it will continue to stink.

It can get to the point where bankers and waiters, stock brokers and carpenters, Arnold Schwartzenegger and Andy Stern will join hands and sing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and it will still stink.

And that’s because the economy has come to depend on two contradictory, stinking processes.

The first is that most American workers have to be paid shit to do jobs they hate but are terrified of losing with minimal benefits and no hope of raises or bonuses or advancement or a secure retirement.

The second is that American consumers have to spend more and more every year not just on the goods and services they need but on useless crap they don’t need, don’t really want, and can’t really afford.

By the way, I include among the useless crap they don’t need, don’t really want, and cant’ really afford big houses on an acre of land in suburbs more than a gallon of gas’s drive to and from anyplace they need to be.

Since I’m about to blame Ronald Reagan for everything that’s wrong with the economy and the American Dream of owning a big house on an acre of land in a suburb several gallons of gas away from everyplace people need to be began in earnest just after World War II when Reagan was still a New Deal Democrat, I should explain why I’m also blaming him for this.  And I’ll do that in another post.  But for now I can sum it up in three letters---S-U-V.

At any rate, for, oh, about 25 years, from the end of the Reagan Recession (brought about by Reagan’s attempt to give away the store to Corporate America too fast) until 2008 when it all fell apart, the American economic engines chugged along fueled by paying American workers less and less while getting them to spend more and more.

The only reason this worked for as long as it did, to the degree that it did work, is that Americans were encouraged to give themselves the raises their employers no longer felt compelled to give them by charging everything to their credit cards.

Then, almost all at once, in the early to mid-2000s, a critical mass of people hit their credit limits all at once.

Meanwhile, the economy had pretty much stopped producing jobs at all, except for ones that paid too little and demanded too much, and that was that.

It took Wall Street, the banks, Washington, and most of the Media a few years to notice what everybody else had noticed right away because they felt it---the fear, the worry, the frustration, the loss---right away.  That’s probably the main reason the Democrats were given control of Congress in 2006 and why they elected Barack Obama in 2008.  Voters were hoping the Democrats would notice the economy stunk and do something to change it.

Unfortunately, Democrats, including the President, have been flailing around looking for ways to fix things rather than change them.  Fixing the economy means putting it back the way it was, which stunk.

It’s good that if the trend continues, more jobs will have been created under President Obama during 2010 than were created under President Bush during his entire eight years in office.  But it’s not good news.

It just confirms what most people already knew.  Under Bush, the economy stunk.

Now, here’s the reason I think this is Reagan’s fault.

Business---that is Business with a capital B, which is a way of saying the rich bastards who control most of the money---has always dreamed of the day when they could pay workers nothing and shake every last dime out the pockets of consumers while giving them next to nothing by way of superior goods and services in return.

Workers and consumers knew that about Business and understood not only what was unfair about this but what was wrong with it.  You can’t get blood from a stone.  Pay people too little and charge them too much and very quickly they will run out of money.

Among its many benefits, the New Deal enacted policies based on the principle that the economy belongs to workers as much as to bosses and that means they should get their fair share of the money and benefits and when they do this increases wealth and prosperity for all.

Then Ronald Reagan had his great conversion.

Or to put it another way, then General Electric bought him, mind, body, and soul, and put him to work selling America on the idea that the New Deal had it backwards, that the economy belongs to the rich and that the more of the money and the benefits they get their grubby hands on, the better this will be for the rest of us.

Reagan wandered the highways and by-ways preaching the new gospel:  Give us all your money, and somehow, some way, some day, we will make you rich in return.

Of course, when he became President he pursued policies that advanced the interests of Big Business, policies designed to put more our money in their grubby hands, and he kept up the sales pitch.

A rising tide lifts all boats---except the boats with holes in their hulls and the little ones that get swamped in the wakes of the giant yachts.

But you’re a yacht, right?

You’re not?  Why not?  What did you do wrong that you’ve wound up in a leaking dinghy without oars?

And that was the second, insidious part of the pitch.

Reagan chuckled genially while factories closed and farms failed and assured us that this was all for the good but he added that we weren’t to worry about the jobs lost, the communities wrecked, the ways of life destroyed, the families ruined because…those people deserved their plight.

They were the “inefficient.”

They were holding the rest of us back.

They had to be left behind on the trail so the rest of us could get to the gold fields faster.

It was their fault they couldn’t keep up.

They should have known not to have been so damned “inefficient.”

But what if you were one of the inefficient?  What if the factory you’d worked at for thirty years closed?  What if your little business was run out of business by the mega-corps?  What if your family farm no longer supported your family?

What were you supposed to do?

Keep quiet about it.

You didn’t want people to know you were one of the inefficient, did you?

You didn’t want your friends and neighbors to think you were the one of the ones who just couldn’t keep up.

Or didn’t try to keep up.

After all, that was part of the President’s pitch.  You failed because you didn’t work hard enough.

Wasn’t “inefficient” just a euphemism for loser?

And if you didn’t agree with that definition?  If you objected?  If you complained?  If you asked for help from the government?

Then you were one of them, weren’t you?

The whiners.

The complainers.

The lazy.

Pssst.  Welfare queens.

Don’t get yourself mixed up for one of them.

Better to pretend you’re doing just fine.  Better to pretend you’re one of the “efficient.”

And if you can’t pull that off, blame them.

Not the corporations that were taking away the jobs and the money.

Not the President who was aiding and abetting the theft of the economy.

Not the whole stupid idea that if you let the rich and powerful own everything and run everything as they saw fit they would reward you by making you one of them magically.

Not the lunatic idea that it was your fault that you’d been mugged and robbed.

And certainly not yourself for having fallen for the con and voted for the guy, twice.

No.

Them.

Blame them.

End of Part One.

Will Bunch’s Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy is out in paperback.

_________________

Related:  Where the jobs are and what they’re paying.

Even though it all still stinks, things are getting better.  The President and the Democrats are getting things fixed.  Like the auto industry.

NYCweboy contemplates the Eternal Sunshine of the Liberal Mind.

Ronald Reagan, Fiscal Conservative.

Hat tips to Shaun Mullen, Steve Benen, Len Hart, and Bruce Bernstein, who, as I’ve said before, is one of the best bloggers without a blog blogging today.

Comments

[Jason Lefkowitz]

Reagan chuckled genially while factories closed and farms failed and assured us that this was all for the good but he added that we weren’t to worry about the jobs lost, the communities wrecked, the ways of life destroyed, the families ruined because…those people deserved their plight.

They were the “inefficient.”

They were holding the rest of us back.

They had to be left behind on the trail so the rest of us could get to the gold fields faster.

This is an important point, and it's one that Mario Cuomo pushed back on in his speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention, which I think still stands as one of the high points of modern political rhetoric:

President Reagan told us from the very beginning that he believed in a kind of social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. "Government can't do everything," we were told, so it should settle for taking care of the strong and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest...

It's an old story. It's as old as our history. The difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and confidence. The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail. "The strong" -- "The strong," they tell us, "will inherit the land."

We Democrats believe in something else. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees -- wagon train after wagon train -- to new frontiers of education, housing, peace; the whole family aboard, constantly reaching out to extend and enlarge that family; lifting them up into the wagon on the way; blacks and Hispanics, and people of every ethnic group, and native Americans -- all those struggling to build their families and claim some small share of America...

We Democrats must unite so that the entire nation can unite, because surely the Republicans won't bring this country together. Their policies divide the nation into the lucky and the left-out, into the royalty and the rabble. The Republicans are willing to treat that division as victory. They would cut this nation in half, into those temporarily better off and those worse off than before, and they would call that division recovery.

This rings as true today -- maybe more so, with the benefit of hindsight -- as it did in 1984. Of course, the Democrats ended up getting crushed in 1984, and from then on no Democrat, not even Barack Obama, would dare articulate this idea this clearly or this forcefully.

Which may be Ronald Reagan's most enduring legacy: fear. Fear of his memory, which has Democrats still voluntarily neutering themselves long after the rest of the nation has consigned it to the history books.

[Beel]

Great piece!!!

[actor212]

Somewhere between the Great Depression and Ronald Reagan, Randian thought began to creep into the Republican thought processes. I'm not sure when and certainly Reagan refined it to be a national political trope, but someplace earlier, because it was Ike who warned us about the industrial and the military conspiring against the people of the nation.

He was right. They did. GE? Defense contractor first and foremost.

[Mustang Bobby]

What were you supposed to do?

Keep quiet about it.

You didn’t want people to know you were one of the inefficient, did you?

You didn’t want your friends and neighbors to think you were the one of the ones who just couldn’t keep up.

Or didn’t try to keep up.

After all, that was part of the President’s pitch. You failed because you didn’t work hard enough.

This is the same logic used by faith healers who say the little kid didn't survive appendicitis because his parents, who rejected going to the hospital, didn't pray hard enough. It's Darwinism on crack

[Kevin Wolf]

Excellent. Let's stop showing that damn "Tear down this wall!" clip and start tearing down his myth.

[Joe]

Economics fail.

[KLG]

Thanks, Lance. Great work, as usual. I work with several research technicians, including the one who works for me, who are in their early-30s, so all they know is the Reagan-Bush Descendancy (including the Clinton-Gore Interregnum). They are true believers, but seem not to realize that their jobs and their families' livelihoods are dependent on federal funding of science (which is in the toilet as it is). Not only that, their spouses are very well paid civilian employees of the US Air Force at an airbase that is perpetually considered for closure. They are among the "efficient" right now, but have no idea how close to the precipice they are. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.