Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction:
I thought it was a good and needed time, given the state of national politics, and after the second round of Democratic debates, and our continuing, violent national saga of mass shootings, to put some of my thoughts on paper concerning what you see in the title: reflections I have had on the readings I’ve done about the first New Deal and the birthing period of the Green New one to come…
If I have a shorthand for my thoughts and feelings, it comes from what I wrote more than a decade ago, after reading Robert D. Leighninger Jr.’s book about the “Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal,” what it built and who it served, prompted by the author’s own powerful reminder:
"The New Deal, in a very short period of time, contributed a tremendous amount to the nation's public life in the form of physical and cultural infrastructure. That investment paid dividends for many decades thereafter and in many cases is still paying back. That should be remembered in times when commitment to public life ebbs and belief rises that we simply cannot afford to invest. There was a time in our history when people found ways to combat despair by building for the future. The evidence is all around us."
Perhaps that time is here again. (My emphases.)
My present day efforts turned into a long essay, so I have broken it into two parts. Here’s the first half.
COMPASS IN THE STORM
From the NEW DEAL (1933-1941) to the GREEN NEW DEAL (2019…)
Part I: Countering “Fear Itself” with Programs for the “Forgotten Man”
If you know nothing to little about the first New Deal, then begin with William E. Leuchtenburg’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. First published in 1963, it was a Bancroft Prize winner in 1964, when the nation’s governing coalition was still stamped by the deliveries of the New Deal. I see that there is a 2009 reissuance of the original paperback (which I use), both available at Amazon. So why start with this volume? It’s because love it or hate it, the legacy of the New Deal still forms a fundamental compass point in American ideological politics. Which is to say it is usually a buried story, like iron in rocks, which can bend our compass, though the actual force field is hidden. Thus Newt Gingrich in the December of Trump’s election year, said Trump would continue the long standing dismantling project of the Republican Right, since Goldwater at least: to overturn every last legacy of the New Deal. I believe it was still the legacy of the New Deal, creating a public appreciative of active government which was also on their side, that led to the Republican strategy to oppose anything and everything put forth by President Obama in order to to head off any re-run of that dynamic.
The author of this classic – I want to call it a primer, but it is beyond that - is now 97, and I had the honor to meet him at the 75th New Deal Anniversary Conference held in Washington, DC, on April 9, 2008. Although it was a fierce Democratic Primary year, none of the candidates or major figures in American politics showed up. That tells you where the New Deal stood inside the party just before the Great Financial Crisis broke in full fury that fall.
This book, simply and forcefully, lays out the state of the nation in 1933, after three full years of depression, and the strange mood of the people. In the world’s most fiercely individualistic and competitive capitalist economy, and proud of it, that economy was just about to entirely collapse, on the verge of a banking implosion. The closest contemporary analogy I can give you about this mood is that it is matched by the feelings of Californians returning to the ruins of Paradise after the great fire in the fall of 2018: numbness. That would change.
Leuchtenburg’s account then, is centered on that shattered economy and the major programs, many experimental in nature, designed to get the system back on its feet, its causal excesses reined in by a powerful federal government for once on the side of the “Forgotten Man.”
Robert D. Leighninger, Jr’s 2007 book, Long Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal, is a modern day description and interpretation of the core “curriculum” of what the New Deal built, the agencies which carried out the tasks, and the people who led those agencies. I’ve shared this volume with citizens who knew little to nothing about this history, and who came away marveling at the economy with which Leighninger lays out the works, the leadership and the rationales for the programs, the famous ones, like the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1943), the Public Works Administration (1933-35) and its later iterations as the CWA, the Works Progress Administration, the PWA, and of course, the one of a kind and still controversial, especially with environmentalists, TVA (1933…) The racial shortcomings, serious skirmishes with the AFL-CIO, and, unfortunately, not taken very seriously, attempts to build a CCC program for young women by Eleanor Roosevelt and the first woman cabinet officer in US history, Frances Perkins at the Department of Labor are all addressed, and seated in the values of the 1930’s, viewed from a different time, but not distorted or “rewritten.”
I had the chance to sit with the author during lunch at that same Anniversary conference in 2008. I had written a review of the book less than a month before, and published it online, one of two reviews at the giant online retailer. And here’s how I concluded:
And that's why this book is so important. It's hard to pick up a major paper today in 2008 without encountering calls for increased infrastructure spending, much of it centered around a new green Apollo-type project to fight Global Warming, including a proposal by James Galbraith for a National Infrastructure Bank. Many are saying: enough with the pyramid schemes and hedge funds on Wall Street - give us the investments that actually build what we need. And on that note, here's how the author closes out his remarkable book:
"The New Deal, in a very short period of time, contributed a tremendous amount to the nation's public life in the form of physical and cultural infrastructure. That investment paid dividends for many decades thereafter and in many cases is still paying back. That should be remembered in times when commitment to public life ebbs and belief rises that we simply cannot afford to invest. There was a time in our history when people found ways to combat despair by building for the future. The evidence is all around us."
Perhaps that time is here again. (My emphases.)
I make no secret about it; I’m a contemporary advocate for a new Civilian Conservation (Climate?) Corps, separate or incorporated into the 2nd Bill of Rights’ first right, that to a job, or the Green New Deal’s “Job Guarantee.” In good part, it’s because we have so much restoration work to do – human and natural. FDR, and Leighninger here, understood that the original CCC, which at its peak in 1935 employed 500,000 young men in 2500 or so camps spread around the nation, but especially in rural America, was about restoring nature, forests and soils, but also very much about restoring morale to unemployed young men, mostly urban. They were increasingly riding the rails as hobos looking futilely for work, and forming a phantom fear army (in the eyes of the establishment) of the rootless, ready for revolution, starting in the cities.
And let’s not forget another emphasis of Leighninger’s work: what took place, tree planting and soil conservation work, roads, parks and electricity generation, was aimed at what we today call “Rural Red-State, De-Industrialized America.” America in 1933 wasn’t de-industrialized in today’s sense, indeed, the very opposite, yet the factories and the workers were idle, not yet placed on the scrapheap by Globalization, the service/knowledge economy - and the rise of China. But they were disposable with only a feeble, underfunded private charity network to aid them, which quickly ran out. American farmers were near collapse suffering terribly low commodity prices, foreclosures and the Dust Storms.
Yet the urban unemployed from Baltimore worked in far western Maryland, where they were taught carpentry, masonry and basic electricity skills by unemployed locally skilled men. This was also, then, a cultural exchange program: rural and urban Americans discovering each other as useful citizens. Once again, in 2019 the old tensions between Baltimore’s troubles and today’s awful, destructive politics is in the news as I write this. In retrospect, the New Deal did a better job handling the tensions, despite the racial segregation.
Under-employment, drug crisis, suicide/national morale crisis today in 2019, a nation stunned by its own domestic violence, mass shootings, even with a allegedly “good economy”…it won’t be easy because I see the needs today facing gender, age and racial barriers in ways that the first CCC couldn’t, and didn’t face. And the coastal/heartland tensions are with us still, maybe worse. A need for decent, disciplined work at honorable wages: for conservation (where are the basic biodiversity inventories, the baselines of what is here now, state by state?), culture (Maryland’s roadside historical markers look like they’re from the 1930’s), and caring, another way to look at “CCC” today…and for moderating the often destructive American fixation on competition with another big “C” word: Cooperation. So much wasted, prematurely retired talent in our nation, a nation of laid off middle managers, “preemies” - - retired military personnel…waiting for the nation to dream and think big once again.
Leighninger’s book is like one of the WPA travel or field guides: fully descriptive, and pointing towards future efforts. And let me add one more “C” word: competence. The CCC camps were competently run by reserve officers, without the full panoply of military discipline though, and what the young men built, was competent, and better than that, in design and durability. The evidence is all around us, as the book fully demonstrates.
And you can visit what was built via the comprehensive inventory built at this great website, “The Living New Deal”: https://livingnewdeal.org/
The Green New Deal Resolution raises the goals of “healthy food” and “supporting family farming… a more sustainable food system… and sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health.” Implicit in this, to me at least, is a more decentralized food growing system, and of course, better methods. This speaks directly to rural America, and the need to train new farmers and a farm workforce that is educated and decently paid, located between farm owners and the fraught migrant/picker work force. This opens up a whole new aspect to the work of a modern CCC. I’ve been to agriculture workshops where non-profit experiments are training prospective farmers in urban farming and the new intensive, multi-crop-small acreage methods. It’s a world of promise, that and all the abandoned buildings which plague our de-industrialized towns, cities and rural regions, some 5,000 alone in the Western Maryland county I live in. Their safe demolition or green rehabilitation, openly called for in the GND Resolution, promises jobs, housing and incomes to those parts of our nation which need it the most. And it invites the participation of the unions, especially the building trades. These paths, as well as a boost in Social Security Incomes, and perhaps some other incentives, like a bonus paid to those under 50 willing to move to rural America, promise more hope and reality than all the futile dreams of luring big corporate America back to our neediest regions. They’re not coming back folks, get over it, they have other values and international dreams.
Let’s shift focus a bit, not from the Great Depression itself, which gave rise to the New Deal’s response, but to the inner lives of the nation’s citizen’s and how they were affected, as laid out by Morris Dickstein’s ambitious, engrossing 2009 book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. This is also very much a work of intellectual history, but accessible for the serious reader, and encyclopedic in its coverage of film, literature, dance, theatre and the arts, with strands of populism and national identity rediscovered that have clear resonance for today - in the best sense of those terms. Dickstein is an English and Theatre Professor at CUNY – that’s New York City’s foundational modern college, and he’s previously written with clarity and power about American literature, in Gates of Eden and Leopards in the Temple, where the content also lives up the promise of the bold titles.
Dickstein’s work is important beyond the obvious nostalgic appeal of great movies seen and books we’ve read from the period: about gangsters, chorus girls and migrant farmers, and the much photographed Appalachian poor. His book is about the American soul and psyche, and what the economic collapse wrought on that terrain, a veritable Dust Bowl for the American Dream, a now creedal formulation which first gained widespread traction in that decade.
Consider this for the male psyche, where the man of the house was the bread-winner, decision maker, the reigning patriarch. Suddenly, the highly competitive male citizen was confronted with his heritage: your standing in society is based on what you earn and now you can’t earn because there simply are too few jobs to go around. Your self-worth has fallen by all the old barometers, and now you have an unwanted “standing” - in a breadline. Or on the dole, public or on private charity. By the old ways of thinking, it’s your fault, it’s due to your character shortcomings, because, after all, 60-70% of the men still have jobs, however much the pay and hours have been cut. And that links us back to Leuchtenburg’s portrait of the mood of the country as FDR took office in 1933; Dickstein writes that “unlike Europeans who turned to Fascism, Communism or militarism…most Americans remained passive, even self-accusing in the face of Depression conditions. They neither rebelled nor submitted to the despotic rule of a would-be savior. This looks even more remarkable today than it did then.”
And economic troubles led to family troubles, then as today. Dickstein writes that “most observers agree that women fared better than men during the Depression, indeed, that many women were thrust into the role of both supporting their families, often with menial jobs, and holding them together emotionally, while the men, unmoored and rudderless, were beginning to break up.” It’s hard to read that today and not think of the declining life spans for middle aged working class whites, the “Deaths of Despair,” and the drug epidemic in Rural Red State de-industrialized areas.
Such existential threats to the American Dream in the 1930’s were met, in part, by “gangster films and backstage musicals that reinvented rage-to-riches fantasies in terms the Depression audiences loved and needed.” The complex message from Dickstein is this:
At the heart of the New Deal was a tension between individualism and community, between private initiative and public planning. Out of this conflict capitalism was saved, in the modified form of the welfare state; the success ethic survived, but the federal government began to take a far more active role in most Americans’ lives….not to be seriously challenged until the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan set out to convince Americans that greed was good, wealth was no embarrassment, and government itself was the problem.
The New Deal - its programs, achievements and major personalities, especially FDR’s, have been the subject of thousands of books and academic articles over the past 75 years. It is quite rare then when a work is given the status of a major “reinterpretation,” which is the tag applied to Ira Katznelson’s 2013 book “Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time.” It was awarded the Bancroft Prize in 2014. The author does the opposite, however, of diminishing the New Deal, calling it the most significant political event in the West since the French Revolution of 1789. He also shifts the focus from FDR and the White House to what he calls the key institution of Western democracies, the legislature, and thus to the American Congress, and which interests had the most power over chairmanships and key committees during the 1930’s. The answer was conservative Southern Democrats, racist to the core, and standing up for property owners first, a cheap, non-union, non-integrated work force, and a world where everyone knew their place, women and blacks especially, and tenant farmers/sharecroppers too, white and black, both of whom were becoming “disposable” as agriculture mechanized. These oligarchs were softened for early New Deal legislation by some residue populism directed against the Eastern financial establishment.
Let’s go back to the title, “Fear Itself.” The fear among liberals, democrats and socialists in the Western Democracies was that with the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, and the gridlock that resulted in their parliaments/legislatures from the clash of dramatically incongruous values, liberal procedural democracy could not hold. For FDR and the New Deal to succeed where others had failed, they had to make terrible tradeoffs – “dirty hands” – with morally repugnant allies; with these Southern forces who watched every piece of legislation, especially labor legislation, for its impact on racial relations. This was less a problem in the first 100 days legislation in the spring of 1933 than it became after anti-lynching legislation was introduced in January of 1934, when progressive forces pressed FDR to back the morally right course. He declined to comment on it, much less support it, knowing that it would jeopardize everything else that the New Deal had not yet accomplished. In foreign policy, after 1941, reality meant alliances of convenience with awful forces: Soviet Russia, again morally repugnant but absolutely necessary for victory over Nazi Germany.
Back to the title, the subtitle actually: “The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time.” This work connects directly to the Green New Deal Resolution, which makes it clear that this time around, a Green “New Deal” must take into account those citizens, not just black ones, who were left out of the first one by these terrible existential dilemmas, which Katznelson states are always where the politics of those who wield power end up: with their hands dirty. Which is downright Niebuhrian, with no regrets. This book is an accomplished scholar’s answer to those on today’s left, especially around racial issues, who condemn the New Deal and FDR personally for being racist and not doing enough. The New Deal had a hard time reaching white tenant farmers and sharecroppers as well: its programs saved small independent farmers, and the aristocrats of farming, the “Bourbons” of the South, but not those most in need – not through agricultural programs at least.
And as we progress into the later stages of the New Deal, we see Katznelson raise the clear outlines of today’s Republican Right, then a joint “project” (more a marriage of convenience) between Southern racist Democrats and the traditional Republican conservative opposition to large domestic projects pushed by “big government” threatening the role of the private sector.
This is a profound and powerful work, fully deserving of the Bancroft prize it won. It reminds us how easy it is to impose policy frameworks and demands from contemporary troubles upon eras where they don’t fit, or might distort the cruel dilemmas the original historical actors faced.
In the Introduction, Katznelson summarizes the “Janus” shaped faces that the New Deal state left American politics with. The first is the procedural state, the grand “bargaining” process among the interests, made famous by Robert Dahl at Yale (“Pluralist Democracy in the United States: Conflict and Consent,” 1967) and critiqued by C. Wright Mills, Theodore Lowi and Michael Sandel. This direction by Katznelson begins to get at the heart of the resonate charge today that America cannot accomplish anything large (other than repeated tax cuts for the wealthy and futile crusades in the Middle East). The reason is that the procedural state, made worse by the decay of the progressive side of New Deal policies, apparent by the mid-1970’s, is about dividing up the domestic economy’s fruits among competing causes, and eventually allowing new claimants to the table, but not altering the shape of the pie based on “content, substantive justice, or ultimate values.” I might add that in the realm of economics and indeed, the flow of ideas about the American “political economy,” there have been disputes over the best way to enlarge the pie, by extra rewards to the private sector or by targeted public interventions into research and infrastructure, and labor force policies, as well as the mission of the Federal Reserve.
And the other face to this new Janus headed power is what Katznelson calls the “crusader” state, the one that was able to supply values and purpose to foreign policy, the background to the Cold War which was so all consuming during the late 1940’s and right on through JFK’s presidency to Vietnam and rise of Reagan.
Katznelson is formidable in his handling of this American state shaped by the New Deal, and the opposition alliance which it triggered. On the major outlines of it, he is mostly correct. His introduction is tantalizing in its scope, but the follow through logic to our times is cut off by his work’s own clearly delimited historical range. So let me complete it with my version to bring his outlines of this vast yet ineffectual state up to date, looking intently at the mission outline in the Green New Deal Resolution, the most ambitious policy proposal ever put forth to the American people and its Congress on Feb. 7, 2019, by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the Bronx, New York (D, D-14) and Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts. The Green New Deal Resolution’s ambitions flow right out of the weaknesses of scope and purpose that Katznelson has attributed to this now decayed New Deal state. Faced with a new existential challenge – Climate Chaos – to replace the vast challenge of fascism and the militarism of Japan, and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the “procedural” state now cannot find the values or the powers to reshape the domestic economy – or allegedly find the funds even if it could find the values and tools. What Fear Itself couldn’t get to is the rise of Neoliberalism as the broad umbrella philosophy of governance, often unstated, and its uniting of conservative Republicans and moderate and conservative Democrats like the Clintons and Barack Obama always hoping for bi-partisanship. A Neoliberalism highlighted by its uniting of a weakened regulatory state, anti-labor policies, enshrinement of globalization and international corporations’ powers via trade deals they dominate, and then the collapse of this system’s financial heights, the avalanche of 2007-2008 which sped downhill from the fault ridden financialization of this new political economy. It is a political economy well at odds with the one which emerged from the New Deal, shifting the balance of power to private markets, very flawed and dominated markets, and from the federal regulatory agency powers which were now in their thrall, intellectually and politically. Government regulators deferred to the “smartest people in the world,” who worked for Wall Street and Hedge Funds and Private Equity, not the SEC. And collapsing after 2008 is not only the working class in the West, which had been in decline since at least the 1970’s, the loser in these new arrangements, but Nature itself, which cannot withstand the cumulative impacts of the powers and gases released by the true Leviathan of our age: the Private Sector. So confident were the forces of Neoliberalism - was not the victory in the Cold War the ultimate proof of its superiority over all other ideologies? - that it could not see any downside to the red carpet it rolled out to greet the rise of next great Super Power, China.
Indeed, then, “Fear Itself” takes us to the origins of “Our Time” but due to its era limited historical terrain, it cannot complete the picture necessary to understand how and why the Green New Deal impulse emerged in very late 2018 and early 2019.
Three books from what I will term the “transition era” will help explain the historical currents both supporting and opposing the Green New Deal, which reached its apex of national prominence, and Congressional support, in April of 2019 when Representative Ocasio-Cortez, known now simply as AOC, appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the Green New Deal as the subheading.
First and still quite relevant is Alan Brinkley’s fine work from 1995, “The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War.” The glum title refers to the successful blocking effect of the newly risen anti-New Deal coalition which was given so much attention in Katznelson’s “Fear Itself.” The recession is that of 1938, when the balanced budget residue in FDR’s fiscal brain re-emerged, full force, dramatically cutting federal spending, and the private sector did not respond, did not pick up the slack, plunging the nation’s workforce and economy back into 1929-1932 numbers, or worse. FDR quickly changed course, but he had a harder time with passing anything large through Congress, Southern Democrats and Conservative Republicans now working together to block the realization of their fears of the Federal Leviathan state. But the international calamities were arriving to rescue the stalled domestic drivers of economic recovery, and well before Pearl Harbor it was clear that the nation would be re-arming in a serious way.
And let’s not forget the date and therefore the context of Brinkley’s book, published in 1995. I would call that year very close to the climax of Neoliberalism’s dominance in the Democratic Party, just a year before Bill Clinton announced that the “Era of Big Government is over.” Of course, as the Great Recession reminded us in 2007-2008, the era of big problems was not over. Both Nature and official science reports have since driven the ecological side of the great two headed warning: that Nature itself is on the brink, and that will threaten the economy in exogenous ways apart from the endogenous troubles that have historically plagued capitalism since the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century. The Green New Deal Resolution formalizes these currents, unsolved problems, and the crises and near collapse of Neoliberalism as the fading successor to the old New Deal coalition, c. 1933-1975.
What’s fascinating and relevant for today in Brinkley’s book is the portrait of the American economy as it shifts from civilian to military purposes, and how vast are the mobilization tools to accomplish that: rationing, new financial instruments built upon some existing New Deal efforts…and industry and labor contending for major influence over the new guiding/planning institutions…with the private sector taking the lead, tolerating a truce with labor, agreeing not to roll back its massive organizing gains from the rise of the CIO, in exchange for a no strike pledge and labor seats on the governing boards. But labor’s attempts to shape the actual re-armament policies, what factories will produce and where, is stiffly rebuffed. As the contemporary term goes, labor was told by industry (and the military, who worked closely with business and mostly ignored labor) to “stay in your lane,” stay out of the means of production, “we’re running this.” You keep that labor force “disciplined” and the pay will be decent. After the war, it was all downhill for labor, in numbers, power, and political influence. Its prominent place in the Green New Deal Resolution is an attempt to correct this awful history, and ought to have been greeted with joy by the AFL-CIO leadership. Instead…well… labor sounded again like something from the Meany-McGovern era rifts. Or Rodney Dangerfield’s “Can’t Get No Respect.”
There are a number of creative state based efforts to heal this old rift, labor vs environmentalists, built around the idea of a “just transition,” a key concept in the GND Resolution. But so far, they haven’t carried the AFL-CIO leadership with them. It has to be worked out.
In my mind, it’s a good idea to read Brinkley’s work up against the Victory Plan put forth by the folks at Climate Mobilization in 2016, here at https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/victory-plan and both against the book Drawdown, edited by Paul Hawken and out in 2017, which attempts to undertake the work that the Select Standing Committee on the Green New Deal might have undertaken, had the Speaker of the House not quashed the idea. And that is to rank 100 solutions for their efficacy in reducing Green House gases. No endorsement here of their answers, just the recognition that their methodology has got to be part of a national planning process, and eventually the basis of the Plan which we don’t have, the focus of the Sunrise organization protest and the Green New Deal Resolution itself. (https://www.sunrisemovement.org/)
And let me worry out loud about the “sequencing,” or better, lack of it on the ecological and economic left. I would think that the declaration of a Climate Emergency would have preceded the Green New Deal Resolution and Committee Plan efforts, and that a Climate Mobilization of the nation would follow as the final step, but that’s not what has unfolded.
One of the strangest books to emerge in the late twilight of Neoliberalism, in 2004, was one by the famous Cass Sunstein, part of the Obama “Brain Trust.” Its title gets one’s hope up – “The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More than Ever.” This book is excellent background material on where that 2nd Bill of Rights emerged from in the FDR federal agencies (the small planning group, always under attack) and its launch in his State of the Union Address from 1944. The book sets forth FDR’s almost conservative framing of its values – a Second Bill of Rights is needed to secure economic rights because the economic race, much less economic security (Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness”) cannot be fair without some shared fundamentals out of the starting block, the first right being that to a job (leading to, finally, in the GND Resolution, to the Jobs Guarantee), housing, medical care…and five others…including those for businesses and farmers…Here’s the link to FDR’s full speech, the State of the Union, 1944: http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/address_text.html
And here’s the heart of the argument, in FDR’s own words, just before he lists the eight Rights of the Second Bill of Rights:
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
That’s the good part. But Sunstein comes out of the University of Chicago Law School, and has all the full infatuation of a man of his times, the times of Market Utopianism, so that all these eight rights in the Second Bill await a form of market approved delivery, of which Obama’s health care bill is the perfect embodiment, enshrining the power of the private health care system, drug industry included, with some concessions, largely a federal version of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan, and a long way from universality and Sanders and Warren’s Medicare for All.
The irony here is that candidate Senator Bernie Sanders now has twice grounded his political vision in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, which is liberal democracy or social democracy at its best, but not the traditional democratic socialism as Sanders acknowledges in his presentations, yet all the while keeping his socialist label. FDR, meanwhile, when put on the spot called his philosophy simply “Democrat and Christian.” Here is Sander’s address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbN9OD83f5I
For those who want to argue about where Cass Sunstein is coming from, perhaps the most generous I can be is that it’s the left wing of Neoliberalism. For proof, just look at the structural role he played in the Obama presidency: as the private sector’s gatekeeper inside the Executive Branch, to fend off expensive regulations in a process that gives industry a first and prior attack pathway on regulations in addition to their input in the formal agency regulatory processes, such as responding in the public register to EPA proposals. And of course they have lots of dialogue with agency personnel already before the rule is put in the register: so three shots actually. Green groups get two if they are lucky, sometimes just one. See the work of Professor Rena Steinzor: https://works.bepress.com/rena_steinzor/53/ and the history of global warming considerations behind the scenes, between scientists, federal regulatory powers, and the powers of the private sector, c. 1979-1989.: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html
If one wants to trace a personal history of Neoliberalism within Democratic policy circles, Sunstein is the one to follow. And David Harvey’s 2007 book “A Brief History of Neoliberalism” should help you keep things in perspective.
Citizens who are shocked by the degree of opposition to the Green New Deal Resolution (despite gaining 94 House and 12 Senate co-sponsors as of July 1, 2019 and many presidential candidate endorsements, 16 out of 24) could get a preview, a very early one, when Amity Shlaes published her “New History of the Great Depression: The Forgotten Man” in 2007. (I’ve re-arranged the title and subtitle.) I won’t go into details here, I wrote a review published at Amazon in 2012, and I think subsequent events, especially the Great Recession, the rise in Inequality, the drop in the participation in the labor force and the great drug epidemic along with the related “Deaths of Despair” put a lot of pressure on her reinterpretation of the Great Depression, which stresses the individual and private civic group reactions to the pain of the 1930’s, including the founding of AA and the religious communal work of Father Divine, with the communal aspect downplayed and the anti-FDR stance emphasized.
I’ll close with a word on an important notion for our understanding of the political economy and the great divide between left and right as the Neoliberal consensus fades out, but has not been decisively displaced. The Forgotten Man was the little tax payer cited in a long essay (1883) by the sociologist William Graham Sumner, a Gilded Age intellectual luminary. The middle-class taxpayer was going to pay for the social democratic Social Gospel public policies – and not like it, anticipating the Right’s Tax Revolt push in the late 1970’s, when California Democrats could not come up with anything big enough to address the faltering property tax system starting to sour that part of the American Dream built on home ownership. You can hear these echoes, in an upscale, contemporary way, as CNN’s Chris Cuomo weighs in on “how you going to pay for it” – raise his taxes? No way.
What Shlaes doesn’t tell you is that WG Sumner was an out and out Social Darwinist; he was more and better than that, but he certainly was that too, and it’s crucial that he anticipates the findings of Nancy MacLean in her fine book (2017) Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical right’s Stealth Plan for America.” Shlaes’ opening Epigram is from a campaign speech of FDR’s in 1932, where he appropriates the meaning of the Forgotten Man from Sumner, and instead of the middle tax squeezed citizen, he becomes the man at the bottom of the oppressive “economic pyramid.”
Let me give Amity Shlaes her due. She is unmatched as an ideological polemicist on the left – until AOC has come along, and AOC hasn’t written any books yet. She is as good in print as Rush Limbaugh is on the airwaves, appropriating enough truth to be plausible, while seriously distorting the complex forces and outcomes of the Great Depression, just as Limbaugh bends the political spectrum into unrecognizable shapes and even stranger, making up unlikely spectrum “bros” (National Socialism late Weimar style as a “genuine” branch of socialism).
Best to you all, and good luck to us in trying to hold our nation together…
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD