Reflection on Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore by James T. Patterson

               I picked this book up to take a break from a very long book about the Holocaust that I’m reading that has been difficult to get through. This book sort of picks up where the last one I finished, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970’s and the Last Days of the Working Class, left off, though it’s not as good as the latter, which was 11/10 amazing. This book covers political, economic, and social issues and is part of the Oxford History of the United States collection, which I can officially vouch for since about a year ago I read the Glorious Cause, the part of the series that addresses the Revolutionary War. Very informative, undergraduate level books that give you a good sense of the times.

               There is some overlap with Stayin’ Alive early on, discussing the economic state of the country, which faced a “Great Recession” from 1973-1975, a term I used to think had only ever been applied to our recession in 2008. This book further drives home the point that busing was a critical political issue across the nation, as whites did not want to bear the costs of integration. They also just didn’t want to integrate. It’s amazing to see the development of the private schools as white parents pulled their kids out of integrated public schools all across the nation and sent them to whiter, private schools. In Boston, for example, in 2003, minorities were 86 percent of public school students. It reminds me of another form of racialized secession, like in the Civil War. It is toxic that segregation continues and it seems like stronger forces are needed to integrate, but to do so in a much more friendly and reasonable way.

               The book also discusses the parallel revolutions that occurred. First, the sexual revolution in the late 1960’s freed women and men to have premarital sex with more partners, especially as birth control became more common. However, a counter-revolution occurred, reaching its peak in the 1990’s of politicized Christianity, “The Moral Majority.” People got divorced more and had more children out of wedlock.

               At the same time, money was being funneled into politics like never before. The average cost of winning a seat in the Senate in 1976 was just $600,000 but by 1990 it was $4 million and I assume much higher today. What was the trigger for this? Libertarians often argue that there’s so much money in politics because government is so big that it is worthwhile for corporations to buy it out but I wonder if there were similar increases during massive increases in federal government spending during World War One, the New Deal, or the Great Society. I would think they’re wrong because the period 1976-1990 is marked by a dramatic reduction of taxes, federal employees, and the size of government. I bet it has to do with campaign finance law, specifically the laws passed in 1974 that I can’t remember the name of (Buckley-Valeo?).

               In the last book I read, I came away with the impression that Nixon was the basis of modern Republican campaigning strategy. Likewise, it seems like Gerald Ford was the basis of Republican high-level staffing from 1974-2009. He hired guys like Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Powell in his administration and those guys would go on to do very big things in the Republican party. The continuities in the Republican party are very consistent. For example, Republicans, at least since Nixon, love the strong man. When Khmer Rouge soldiers kidnapped the American crew of the ship Mayaguez, President Ford sent a rescue team after them and it was a huge failure. They lost more men than had originally kidnapped and didn’t even rescue the hostages. Ford eventually got them back by negotiating, but despite the failure, or maybe because of it, Ford had a huge surge in popularity, people admiring his show of steel. Maybe it’s all Americans, and not just Republicans.

               Despite praising FDR in his inaugural address, Reagan was no FDR. He would cut income taxes multiple times, doing the bulk of the work in getting the top bracket’s rate from 70% in 1981 down to 35% by 2004. Reagan also maintained Nixon’s electoral victories all across the country, winning the business owners in the East, White identity-politics voters (what’s this code for?) in the South, and small-government types in the West who wanted more land in private rather than federal hands. Despite lowering taxes, Reagan ran up deficits by spending $2 trillion during his eight years on the military, and though a smaller percentage of the budget than during the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, “Defense” was taking up 25% of the federal budget. What made Reagan such a special Cold Warrior was that he believed the Cold war could be won. I had thought this was a standard opinion but the author points out that most experts, including CIA officials, failed to predict the demise of the Soviet Union, and many were fine with a perpetual state of Cold War. All Reagan had to do was conceive of an end and will it.

               The culture war of the 1960’s continued to be fought through the 1980’s and 1990’s through issues like abortion, AIDS, gay marriage and service in the military, music censorship, teaching evolution in schools, black power, sexual freedom, and drug use. By the time we look at the 1990’s it feels like its become the preeminent issue in domestic policy, and today the “culture war” affects foreign policy through support of Palestine or Israel, admission of Muslim refugees, and the debates on immigration. If The 1960’s set the “war” in motion, then by the 1990’s it was the strongest force in politics, really only growing stronger as I reflect on the politics of my own life until today, in 2018. It seems like all the biggest issues now that our country faces are social issues about who is to be accepted and who is not to be accepted and what behavior will be tolerated, relating to racial issues, gender issues, religious issues, and more. The 1960’s and 70’s were a sort of pivoting from issues of class and with the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90’s, social issues became everything by the end of the Clinton administration. IT seems like the cultural conflict remains unsettled today, though the left-wing made serious gains in LGBT rights and continues to push forward on legalization of Marijuana. However there is little progress on racial issues, which have seemed to remain at the status quo, though the fighting it worse, like trench warfare.

               America hit its stride economically in the 1980’s and 90’s with tons of optimism in the power of capitalism from the bounce back in the 80’s and the fall of Communism in the early 90’s. In 1999 (as the dot com bubble inflated), teenagers were asked how much money they expected to earn at 30 years old, with the median answer being $75,000, or three times the median salary at the time. It must have been a rude awakening for the economy to crash down on those teenagers not even ten years later. I bet that had a very big impact on their outlook on the world.

               The book then discusses the Clinton years, which appear similar to the Carter years in that Clinton conceded economic policy to conservatives in the Republican Party, but different in that Clinton was a more clever politician than Carter. Clinton was actually able to play the middle successfully where Carter failed but he was still punished brutally by the Republicans even though he was doing their bidding. He was basically a corrupt womanizer, but in politics what else is new? The Republican leaders like Gingrich were doing the same and Dennis Hastert was a child molester. Despite huge economic success, Republicans remained energized and unwilling to give an inch, winning the House in 1995 for the first time since 1955. Democrats remained willing to give up everything they had fought for over half a century for, approving personal income tax cuts as well as cuts to the capital gains tax, which almost exclusively benefits high earners. Clinton and other Democratic leaders continued to bleed the labor unions, once their strong allies and the backbone of the party, with NAFTA, proposed by Bush 41 and confirmed by Clinton, it helped corporate bosses move more jobs out of the United States. By 2001, only 13.5% of American workers (and 9% of those in the private sector) were members of unions. No major political party represented the economic interests of the working class, so they identified with the party that represented their social/cultural interests. Generally, this was the more conservative Republican Party.

               Despite what looked like big success, Americans in general did not feel more successful, even if the stock market was quadrupling in value in just a decade. This was because the real buying power of wages, despite a 90 cent increase in the minimum wage in 1996, continued to decline. Since the 1970’s, the decline in standard of living for White, working class men was especially bad, as wages declined while people of color and women entered the workforce and unions declined, creating intense competition in the labor market. It was ironic then that a lot of standard-of-living items got better. By 2001, any American that wanted color TV had it, the vast majority had microwaves, washing machines, cable TV, and AC, and the majority had personal computers and cars or trucks. These items became cheap enough for most Americans to buy, though almost all wage/income increases went to those who were already the richest. In 2001, the United States produced 22 percent of the world’s output, while Great Britain produced only 8% of world output at the height of its empire in 1913.

               This book was a very good read though it took me a little bit to get through the first chapter. It’s well-written and helped bring me up to speed on why our country was the way it was going up to 9/11, which was when as a child I started to develop consciousness of history/politics going on around me. To really complete my reading from the late 60’s onward I need something on the Bush and Obama administrations now. But for now I’m reading the Chernow biography of George Washington and I feel kind of complete on recent American history for the time being. Anyway, this book was great and very approachable. 8/10 would recommend.

Reflection on Stayin’ Alive: The 1970’s and the Last Days of the Working Class by Jefferson Cowie

This is a top-notch book. “Stayin’ Alive” tells the story of the 1970’s as a transitional decade for the working class, touching on all aspects of the times, going in-depth into the songs and music, the economic debates, and the intraparty wrestling at the Democratic conventions of 1968 and 1972. I’ve been blown away by the similarities to the current political moment and the early 70’s and the story of the loss of class consciousness and the beginning of the current culture war is very well told. Ultimately, it’s the story of the change from the New Deal era to the current nameless era that pivoted with Nixon and peaked with Reagan, emphasizing small government and the lowering of working people’s wages. You can sum it up in one statistic: “The weekly earnings of non-supervisory workers increased 62 percent between 1947 and 1972 before stagnating indefinitely thereafter.”

               The book starts with several case studies of work stoppages and strikes in the late 60’s and early 70’s. It paints a picture of some really big potential for labor, as there was huge consciousness of the need to fight as the decade began. One big reason for this was that a new generation was working in the mines, the mills, and the factories. These were no longer immigrants or “ethnic whites” who had come desperate for any job. These were their sons, who after seeing the youth movements of the 1960’s didn’t just want jobs but wanted good jobs. The new generation fought to achieve union leadership but faced stiff opposition from the union establishment, the worst of which was the murder of insurgent union leadership candidate Jock Yablonski on December 31, 1969. The author clarifies that this “reawakening” that occurred in the rank-and-file was not a renewal, but a breaking apart of old bonds that had kept the New Deal society together. Unlike the 1930’s, when there was unity, labor was just one part of many social movements in the late 1960’s and quickly found itself torn apart by cultural issues and foreign policy debates.

               The second chapter covers the nitty gritty of political machinations, focusing on three men- George Wallace, the virulent racist who advocated for the working class as an independent in 1968 and a Democrat in 1972, George McGovern, Bobby Kennedy’s chosen heir and leader of the “New Left” (hippies), and Richard Nixon. It really surprised me how suddenly the book changed in format and content, but it did so really well. It covers not only how the Democrats were defeated in ’68 after spending 28 of the previous 36 years in power, but how the coalition of the working class fell apart. It began with Wallace’s campaign in 1968, that made a very strong 3^rd party showing, taking five southern states, though losing the urban north largely due to a labor campaign against him. When the 1972 election came around, it was a heated three-way battle between McGovern, Wallace, and a guy named Muskie, who was supported by the unions. McGovern was able to secure the nomination, but significant numbers voted for Wallace, drawn by his opposition to bussing programs, and labor hated McGovern despite his impeccable voting record. This hatred was mainly cultural, as McGovern was supported by more affluent hippie-types, while George Meany, who hated Communists, golfed with Richard Nixon. The Republicans successfully stuck McGovern with the 3 A’s: Amnesty (for draft-dodgers), Acid (confusing it with Marijuana), and Abortion. It was very successful. The unions refused to endorse a candidate and Wallace couldn’t run as an independent after being shot and paralyzed by a would-be assassin. Wallace’s voters flocked to Richard Nixon, as the busing issue tore the democrats apart. Busing was a big issue because while liberal elites supported the integration of the races, it tended to be implemented so that working-class families’ kids were the ones sent to worse schools. Working-class people knew this and fought against it, partially out of racism and partially out of being forced to lower their children’s opportunities. It set white, blue-collar northerners with southerners against blacks and upper-middle-class liberals. 1972 became a purely cultural contest as the unions supported a Republican who wanted to destroy them to avoid the social connections to the “New Left.” The failed McGovern campaign would make cowards out of future Democrats, caving to Republicans on the economy and criminal justice issues for the three to four decades that followed. Richard Nixon lectured his advisors, “The real issues of the election are the ones like patriotism, morality, religion—not the material issues. If the issues were prices and taxes, they’d vote for McGovern. We’ve done things labor doesn’t like. We’ve held wages down. But they’ll support us for these other reasons.”

               Something that shocked me in this chapter was how much labor hurt itself with official support for the Vietnam War. George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, the biggest union at the time, was chiefly responsible, as he was staunchly anti-Communist and backed LBJ’s war all the way, even when it became Nixon’s war. He wasn’t unopposed, but he wasn’t completely alone. Many union men were angry that their sons were sent to fight a seemingly pointless war, but many others (with some overlap) were also contemptuous of the hippies and draft-dodgers who opposed it, especially when it came to the college deferment, as union men didn’t go to college and rich kids did.

               The third chapter is titled “Nixon’s Class Struggle,” and moving on from the failure of the McGovern campaign, covers the triumph of Nixon and his forging of a new political coalition that would last at least until today. It’s an age-old battle. While FDR rallied the people against economic elites who wanted to form an “industrial dictatorship,” Nixon put the blame on a “liberal cultural elite” who want to take your money and give it to someone who doesn’t work. From reading this, I’ve learned a lot about how much of a political workhorse Nixon was, spending, according to his close advisors, about 50% of his time on policy issues and the other 50% on “nonsubstantial aspects of the presidency,” AKA politics- stuff like proposing something popular he was against so he could get Democrats to stop it and put the blame on them. He even secretly had his people hurt the moderate Muskie campaign so he would get to face McGovern, calling New Hampshire voters and telling them that they were Muskie supporters from Harlem and spreading fake news alleging that Muskie supported busing. He wanted to face McGovern to emphasize the culture war.

               The fourth chapter is called “I’m Dying Here,” and covers the culture of the New Left that emerged from the 60’s and supported McGovern along with its failure to build any real political power in the 1970’s. The fundamental issue was (and still is) condescension. John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival said it best (quoted in the book), “when it comes to doing the real crap that civilization needs to keep going, who’s going to be the garbage collector? None of us will.” The problem with the hippies being in the same movement as labor is that the hippies looked down on labor as doing meaningful tasks and living unfulfilling lives. It wasn’t completely off—after all, nobody liked to work in difficult, blue-collar jobs, but folks like it even less when you look down on them for doing so. The hippies and a lot of the social left today managed to achieve their enlightenment by leaving the rest of the pack and separating from society, rarely acknowledging that it is a privilege to do so. They were and are college-educated and never worked with their hands. Why should a working class person respect someone who thinks they’re stupid. It wasn’t the working class that left the hippies, it was the hippies that left them. That division is still strong today with Trump and the modern social liberals who look down on his supporters as ignorant racists who are being fooled into supporting someone who lowers the taxes on the rich and degrades the social safety net. What they’re seeing isn’t people being tricked, but people showing you the price they’re willing to pay for respect and dignity—for a political leader who tells them that they matter. The New Left made a tremendous error that forced them into submission to the true elites—the wealthy.

               This chapter also tells a short story about Carroll O’Connor who played the resentful, working-class Archie Bunker on “All in The Family,” a hit TV show where he was the conservative member of the silent majority in the family. The irony was that when a strike broke out among the electrical workers on set, everyone was willing to break the strike except him. All the other actors, who were younger and more socially liberal, were fine breaking the strike while O’Connor claimed to be incapable of making himself do so. He said, “I could no more go into a building and work with scabs than I could play handball in a church.”

Chapter five is called “A Collective Sadness,” referring to an essay written in 1974 decrying the failure of the left against Richard Nixon and economic conservatives. It returns to the conservatives and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, who began to force wages down with their newfound power. The 1970’s witnessed two recessions and a lot of inflation, for which the two rival explanations were external supply shocks from oil or excessive wages. To this day people argue, but I think that generally people take sides on this sort of thing based on what they already thought, and not on evidence. It was the political opening that businesses were waiting for. They put the blame on the unwillingness of the post-war welfare state to allow its citizens to suffer, arguing that recessions were necessary to keep inflation from running too high. Businesses and management were reinvigorated and used the new Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1971 to dramatically expand their presence in Washington, with the number of business Political Action Committees quadrupling from 1974-1978 and corporations with offices in Washington, D.C. quintupling from 1968-1978. GM only had three staffers lobbying Congress in 1968—by 1978 they had 28. Business achieved total control of the legislative process by the end of the 1970’s after labor peaked in power in 1968 and squandered it. The first thing on the agenda was explicitly stated by U.S. Steel’s Roger Blough, who said “The No. 1 domestic problem of this country is the effect of the wage push on the total lives of everyone.” It is hard to imagine a man so evil that he would ever describe the number one problem in a country as people earning too much money for their hard work. Well the plan worked, and you’ve seen the chart on the internet—since the mid-1970’s, the top 20% of earners have gotten immensely rich and the rest of us have had our wages stagnate at real 1970’s levels. That’s the cost of failure in 1972. Over 40 years of stagnation.

The same chapter also covers the New Left’s push for racial equality in the 1970’s and the problems it ran up against. Despite the left succeeding in integrating the work force, they could not save the working class. In 1974, there were 38,096 African-American steel workers, but only 9,958 by 1988. In electrical trades, blacks increased in representation from 5.3 to 8.4 percent, but in real numbers declined by forty percent. This happened to women too, who gained in the amount of money compared to what men earned, but largely from the fact that men were facing lower wages. In the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)’s Bess F. Young case, an employer explicitly and successfully argued that he fired two black employees not because they were in a union (which would be illegal), but because they were black. 25 years later one could readily be fired for union activities but discrimination was illegal (though still widely practiced). This is another huge failure, as the trade resulted in major gains for management, weakness for labor, and minor gains for minorities. The real progress would be gains for both labor and minorities or at least maintaining labor at the level it was. The culture issues would also split women in the working class from more affluent, liberal, upper-middle-class women. For example, 94 percent of pro-choice women worked outside the home, and half of them had incomes in the top 10 percent of working women in the nation while 63 percent of pro-life advocates did not work outside the home and those that did were unmarried. One researcher explained that, “A social ethic that promotes more freely available sec undercuts pro-life women in two ways: it limits their abilities to get into a marriage in the first place, and it undermines the social value placed on their presence once within a marriage.”

               Chapter six deals with the Carter administration and its failure to do just about anything. The major issue is that Carter conceded to the Republicans that wages were too high and would not work with Democrats to strengthen labor. The Carter years were a key opportunity for labor to bounce back but they couldn’t convince their own president to help them. They tried to pass full employment legislation, but Carter wanted to appear to be on labor’s side, not actually be on their side. He allowed Republicans, who were more energized than ever with big business on their side, to amend the bill into a meaningless, symbolic paper and then, after all of that compromise, the Republicans, emboldened, still shot down the bill. Very reminiscent of modern politics. In the late 70’s, the push began for lowering taxes that would become a rallying cry under Reagan in the 80’s. The Democrats, points out the author, conceded the entire economy to the conservatives, and the left wing produced no ideas to fight with, allowing Republicans, Southern Democrats, and Conservative Democrats to lower wages and reduce inflation, giving birth to today’s massive wealth gap. None of this improved the economy quickly enough for Carter and cost him his base, prompting Ted Kennedy to attempt to primary him in ’80 and for him to lose the general election that year. Between 1949 and 1979, the inflation adjusted average hourly wage for production workers rose 75 percent, but between 1979 and 2005 it rose just 2 percent.

               The seventh chapter returns to cultural issues, like Saturday Night Fever and Taxi Driver, the big movies of the time, as well as Disco and the anti-disco movement. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, but it is really impressive how the author weaves together economic issues alternated with cultural issues, because the shift of the working class to the Republican party and its disappearance in the consciousness of America really relied on both. One interesting point was that when Elvis died in 1977, America lost the last cultural reference point that everyone agreed on. He was an icon of the working class and of a better, more traditional time, so his loss was painfully felt.

               The eighth chapter points out that the working class is not dead, though the industrial working class is much diminished. Today’s working class is in places like Wal-Mart, people working retail in jobs that are safer (thanks to unions) than those of the past but often equally boring and menial and this time without union representation increasing wages. In the future, if there is to be another working-class coalition to be formed, it cannot be based on one sector of the economy, as it was based on manufacturing and industry alone in the mid-20^th century. It has to be a flexible and accommodating movement with a “diversified portfolio” of people that it represents. It went underappreciated in the book that labor was not just vulnerable because social liberals left it behind, but because the American industrial job was at risk no matter what from a globalized, free-market economy.

               In conclusion, this has been a really enlightening book and I feel like I just finished a college course. This is such good reading for understanding today’s politics and it really clarifies the details of what actually happened in the 70’s to give birth to the modern gilded age that was conceived under Nixon, born under Reagan, came of age under neoliberals of both parties until we reach what I hope is its senile end with Trump.

Reflection on CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping by Kerry Brown

               This is a pretty solid book if you’re looking to learn about the modern Chinese Communist party and its leader, Xi Jinping. I approached it wanting to learn more about modern China and I thought a good way would be through a book about Xi, and I was right. However, the book was a little tough to get through despite being less than 300 pages long. It’s missing something extra to make it readable, but maybe that has to do with the subject who largely seems like a boring guy. “Boring guy” is probably the exact image the Party wants for its leaders though, so I guess that’s on purpose. Another fault with this book is that it was published in 2015, two years before the 19^th Party Congress when Xi consolidated power, not naming a successor and setting himself up to change the constitution so that he can rule past the end of his two five-year terms that end in 2022. I would recommend finding a new biography published after this or a revised addition to get additional information about Xi’s more recent aspirations instead of reading this.

The most interesting stuff that happens in Xi’s life are probably the recent consolidation of power and his early experience with being “sent-down.” Xi’s father was one of the OG Communist Party members who was a successful general in the north of China and Mao’s right-hand-man and held the crucial position of censor. However, this all came crashing down when he allowed a novel to mention Gao Gang, an enemy of Mao. The elder Xi was pushed out of government and was very lucky to be left alive in a time when 60,000 were purged and 1,000 were killed. While most modern Chinese leaders lives during the Cultural Revolution are secret and obscured because of their participation in the Party’s horrible crimes, Xi Jinping’s life is well-known because he was on the right side. He was sent to do manual labor on farms during his teenage years and while there applied several times to become a member of the Party, successfully entering on his tenth try. Xi has used this experience to his advantage, being the first Chinese Communist since Mao to have a “life story” that he uses to connect to the people.

               The book really drives home the importance of the shift that happened in 1978, two years after Mao’s death. The author writes, “before 1978 the core task of the Party was to effect cleansing of the class ranks through mass campaigns and class struggle. Its ethos and language of power were wholly different from those of the Party after 1978, which accepted that economic production and growth were the keys to success and national strength.” The reforms made by Deng Xiaoping really changed everything and were solidified in 2001 with China’s entry into the WTO, drastically expanding markets. However, state owned enterprises (SOEs) remain critical to the state because they provide the state’s biggest cash flow. Taxation on persons and corporations makes up less than half of the Chinese government’s income- the majority comes from SOEs. The author writes that “after 1978, it was all about becoming wealthier and better off, even if that meant living with social differences. In essence, this can be understood as a transition from ideological to material goals.” That’s why 1978 is such an important year- China stopped caring about ideology and started caring about economy.

               The author ends by stating that Xi’s power comes directly through the Party and that he is only powerful through it, stating that “on this basis, he is no Mao.” Looking at these words three years later, I would not be so sure. Now that Xi is presumably set to reign for longer than his allotted ten years and has his own “Xi Jinping Thought” enshrined in the Communist Party’s constitution, things have changed. Remember the hierarchy of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics—the only name ever put next to the word “thought” was Mao Zedong’s. I’ll end this with two good quotes from the book:

“It is quite common to argue that the elite may do [what they do] out of cynical greed. Yet a cynic who believes in nothing is unlikely to be greedy. It does not take much to provide the objective biological needs of Homo Sapiens […] That is why cynics don’t build empires and why an imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of population – and in particular large segments of the elite and security forces – truly believe in it.”  - Yuval Noah Harari

“Politics is often about trying to negotiate about who will pay, and how, spreading the risks and burdens today, with the promise of returns sometime tomorrow, or in the future.”- Kerry  Brown, Author

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In the 80’s the Chinese oligarchs, all wanting their family to get ahead but realizing the need for merit to win the day agreed to allow one son from each family go into politics but no more
• Today the one true opposition to the leaders of the party is the hardcore left wing that holds up Mao as their idol and wants to expand State Owned Enterprises (SOE)
• The book often compares Xi to Pope Francis as the leader of a “faith” of over a billion people and often discusses how the Chinese Communists look to the Catholic Church as a model for their own growth, mainly impressed by its 2,000-year survival