Remember this?
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still. -- Ronald Reagan (1989)
It really does sound wonderful, doesn't it? Only there was something Reagan left out of that speech. Something about the conservative vision of America that no conservative wants to talk about. Something that the media never wants to talk about.
The conservative vision "for America" is not for most Americans.
Dubbed "median wage stagnation" by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is above 300.
Why is this happening? Because this is what conservatism was made for. It's why it exists. Conservatives love to utter rhetoric about "redistribution of wealth," but there is no better system of wealth redistribution than conservative policy. Over the last three decades, it has taken most of the wealth that once existed in the Middle Class and shoved it, shoved it, shoved it relentlessly into the pockets of a very few.
Even those directly involved in creating this system don't hide it.
It is not surprising, then, that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1 percent of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90 percent — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12 percent. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.
This is the direct result of the "Reagan Revolution." This is not just what conservative policy has brought us, it is what conservative policy is designed to do.
- Conservative fiscal policy has not worked to grow the broad economy, does not work, and has never worked -- not here, not elsewhere, not ever.
- Conservative policy is designed to rob from the average American and give to the rich. That is its purpose.
- The debts America faces stem directly from the declining revenues caused by conservative policy. Wrecking the government and leaving the nation utterly dependent on the wealthy few is part of the plan.
This is the story of our times, and we are at a defining moment of that story. Conservative policy has spent thirty years turning America into a land of elite and peasants. And from the beginning it's used talk of that "shining city" and "freedom" to mask a movement whose one purpose is seeing that the shining city has a strong gate keeping out the riff-raff.
During the Civil War, Lincoln's economic adviser wrote that there were "two systems before the world." One was a system that elevated the worker, supported the nation, and turned America into the world's largest economy only decades after it's birth. That system could proudly be called the American system. The other system was one that ground men down, destroyed nations, and sought profit for a few at the expense of everyone else. That system was the crumbling economic system of monarchs... before it was repackaged as conservatism.
For three decades the United States has been drained and battered by conservative economics. And for three decades the press has treated this as just a political squabble between left and right. It's not. It's a fight for the survival of America and for the definition of democracy.