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The Politics of Today

Erik Loomis makes a good point about a well-intentioned yet revealing excerpt from George Packer’s new book:

What Packer’s moralism about the choices elite makes miss is that they always made those choices when they could. The Roosevelt Republic only changed their behavior because of the combined strength of a federal government seeing corporate behavior as destabilizing the nation and threatening capitalism with tens of millions of unionized workers providing the votes and public pressure to cower corporations as best they could. One frequently sees progressive commentators today cite some business exec or Republican politician from the 1950s or early 60s on the need for labor unions or Social Security or some such thing. It always makes me chuckle because it is out of context. Rarely did these people actually truly believe in such social programs. And when they actually did, it was because the power of the American working class to demand these programs had become internalized within them, so they could not fathom eliminating them.

Packer isn’t a Baby Boomer, but he seems to have accepted the centrist bromides of our media class just enough to make him sound like one. Remember when we were young, he seems to be asking. Remember when the world was pure and all of our politicians were noble? According to this worldview, the Greatest Generation possessed the moral fabric to stave off the kind of no-holds barred politics of the modern day. The leaders of yesterday, Packer seems happy to remind us, make the leaders of today look tiny:

Much has been written about the effects of globalisation during the past generation. Much less has been said about the change in social norms that accompanied it. American elites took the vast transformation of the economy as a signal to rewrite the rules that used to govern their behaviour: a senator only resorting to the filibuster on rare occasions; a CEO limiting his salary to only 40 times what his average employees made instead of 800 times; a giant corporation paying its share of taxes instead of inventing creative ways to pay next to zero. There will always be isolated lawbreakers in high places; what destroys morale below is the systematic corner-cutting, the rule-bending, the self-dealing.

Note that I agree with the larger concern here – that widening inequality is shocking and the growing debasement of the poor morally disgusting – but I feel like this point can be made without the “Get off my lawn!” sentiment that characterizes so much of our mainstream discourse. As Loomis rightfully points out, elites “always made those choices when they could.” Horrific inequality didn’t miss the middle of the last century. Power didn’t suddenly stop wielding a heavy hand between the New Deal and Contract with America. What the Boomers and their misguided acolytes tend to forget is that the past really isn’t comforting.

In a broader sense, our goal when looking at the past shouldn’t simply be to get back to the way things were. In fact, that probably should never be our goal. Things kind of sucked in the 1950s for more than a few people – and they sucked in some ways that don’t suck as much now. Perhaps a better question would be why our politics have become so fractured and hysterical in the “post-racial” present. I can think of a few reasons, but the Boomers – and perhaps Packer – may not feel too comfy with my hypothesis.

 


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