"I found a lot to agree with in Jonathan Weisman’s big piece [in NY Times] on how Democrats lost the working class, although he barely mentions the extent to which Republicans have followed anti-worker policies, including attempts to privatize Social Security and kill the Affordable Care Act. Reagan, in particular, didn’t just do “trickle-down,” he did a lot to crush unions while cutting taxes on high incomes and raising them on most workers, and presided over trade deficits, deindustrialization and a huge surge in inequality.
Readers should know that the raw fact is that America didn’t have higher inflation than other advanced economies — yet Weisman not only doesn’t tell readers that, he slants the narrative by giving the last word to a Republican asserting that it was all Biden’s fault."
The key distinction to me in the Dems "lost the working class" debate (in as much as they actually have, also debatable), which really only refers to the white working class anyway, is they were lost for cultural reasons not economic reasons long ago.
When the voting rights act was passed in 1965, then potus LBJ is reported to have opined that the South would be lost to the Democrats for a generation. Turns out we're going on our third generation since the bigots began migrating to the Republican party and they're pretty much all there now, metastasizing into everywhere outside the major metropolitan areas.
The racist and mainstream perspective, spread by Fox and conservative media, dictates an economic outlook in which everything is zero sum: If immigrants get ahead, natives must be falling behind; If minority civil rights are expanded, the majority population's rights will suffer decline and restriction. It's always a vicious Hobbesian all-against-all tug-o-war for the profiteering spoils of society, which conveniently reinforces corporate rule's "free market" austerity economics and political-economy.
This take K describes as recent has been routine at the NY Times and WaPo pretty much since post-pandemic inflation first surged in 2021, and in a broader sense is much older. The media studiously keep the global and domestic inflation stories separate. They rarely mention that inflation after a disruption in global supply chains, a major war or global pandemic, is to be expected and to a degree inescapable. The more relevant question is how governing institutions respond to these economic pressures. And in the US, anyway, the Fed, and mainstream economics, responded by putting the onus for inflation entirely on common consumers, reflecting a blinding Wall Street and corporate rule bias in the Fed and mainstream economics. Larry Summers was blaming inflation on Biden for giving consumers too much spending money with his Covid relief bills before the universally expected major supply chain obstacles had even been identified, let alone addressed.
Throughout the whole ordeal mainstream press accounts also studiously ignored the contributions of corporate price gouging to inflation and the cost of living surge, even though Warren was regularly quoting on the floor of the Senate CEO's promising their shareholders price and profit increases based on the favorable, for them, "inflationary environment."
The goal in all this was to reduce the destabilizing extremes of inflation WITHOUT enabling any government interventions that might shift resources toward the laboring classes. Austerity economics, basically.
The republican slant in the media is recognition that they can blunt the real economic interests of the bottom 50% by appealing to their racist bigotry and culture war stupidity. And they just succeeded in the last election, even if narrowly, spectacularly. That Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg will, reportedly, sit on the podium behind Grump at the inauguration isn't just an unprecedented clown show display of corporate greed but a crowning display of the neoliberal order and the catastrophically poor judgment of our new economic overlords and Big Tech broligarchy.
Why "poor judgment" if they are only protecting their own class interests to freely accumulate capital and limit their labor costs? Isn't that what good capitalists are supposed to do? Because pursuing their own self-interests so single-mindedly increases poverty and homelessness, and more generally is always squeezing and lowballing the bottom 50% to inflate their margins, which is the Wall Street game pretty much running the economy.
At this point it's fairly clear the Wall Street position isn't in any clear sense pro-growth so much as pro-Billionaire wealth hoarding. But, worse, it is spectacularly poor judgment because they have turned the government, and the largest and most influential economy in the world, into culture war reality tv with the constant threat of humanitarian crimes the dramatic click bait, meanwhile abandoning global leadership in the energy transition away from heavy carbon emissions and fossil fuels, burn baby burn.
They are gambling that because fossil fuel energy won the 20th century it will win the 21st century. They are wrong but now we have to watch what terrible humiliations they will put the country through before some super majority surge in the electorate demands another course correction.
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