The historian Jon Wiener wrote, in his review of your book, that after the working class stopped talking about class struggle, the financial class doubled down on class struggle and began winning big. So he sees part of the issue, I think, as a failure of nerve on the part of the left and the labor movement. Do you think that’s fair to say? Well, I think that’s a complicated question. One must always recognize, even in our own age, and certainly back during the First Gilded Age, that the element of fear, and real legitimate fear, plays a role. If you want to talk about today, the One Percent, corporate America has become powerful in part because as the country has industrialized, the wherewithal for resisting the power of organized wealth has diminished. The unions that were formed in the nineteenth century, and of course culminating during the New Deal during the 1930s, are a pale shadow of what they once were. They used to provide a defense mechanism. Without them, it’s harder, it’s dangerous, it’s very risky. Let’s say you’re an undocumented immigrant worker, which makes up 12 million people in the American economy, at super exploitative wages. They’re working for employers who they know are violating every wage and hour law on the books. But if you’re one of those people, are you going to have the courage to stand up and report your employer? Maybe not; you’re risking deportation. So fear plays a real role in this. The National Labor Relations Act, which presumably gave people the right to organize, has steadily been whittled away by Congress over the years, and especially Republican presidents over the last 25 years. So in a variety of ways, fear is part of the picture. To what extent is the ‘60s notion of personal freedom or liberation part of the acquiescence problem, or at least part of the fragmenting of resistance? It sort of turned into consumerism, didn’t it? I think it did. I think there was, pardon the expression, a dialectic at work. What began as a kind of liberatory impulse, and, for instance in the case of feminism, identified the family and the patriarchal family in particular as the site of a very intimate, personal oppression, and that one had to open up this private zone to private scrutiny in order to liberate women. And the whole counter-culture, which began to talk about personal liberation, some of which defied the kind of repressiveness and inhibition that had characterized life up until then, came into the hands of corporate America as a way of mining that psyche through the avenues of consumer culture. So private rather than social emancipation becomes the goal, and you can achieve that emancipation in a thousand ways in the marketplace. You can achieve it in your fantasy life. You can achieve it in a variety of ways; corporate America became so sensitive to it that it was even prepared to make fun of itself if it could find a niche market that would buy into that ironic advertising. All corporate America cares about — they’re amoral, I don’t mean anti-moral, just amoral — all that matters is the bottom line. What role did the Reagan revolution play in all this, the social-cultural changes like money worship, celebrity worship, that sort of thing? Well, I think the Reagan era is obviously crucial. It’s a turning point in the history of resistance turning into acquiescence. Part of that is what you allude to, just to be very practical-minded about it; the administration practically begins with the breaking of the air-traffic controller strike, which was the signal to all of industrial and corporate America that it was open warfare on unions, kind of the green light to do that. And of course there was this transvaluation of values. You had a free market during the era of the New Deal that had been constrained by various social and state inhibitions. Under Reagan, we begin to buy into the notion that freedom and the free market are the same thing, and that the way to unleash that freedom is to deregulate the whole economic arena, which gave license to… we began to worship the big financiers, the titans of finance, the Michael Milkens, the Carl Icahns, the Ivan Boeskys, the “greed is good” world, because they became the paragons. They became the pioneers of a new kind of market freedom. And we began to treat them, and the media began to treat them, as kind of savants, as gurus, as heroes, which was very different from the way the culture had treated them a hundred years earlier.
Hey! We're not being greedy ultra-wealthy oligarchs! We're just freedom loving Americans! Don't you like freedom? Don't you want to be like us? Well then just let us be. It's good for you. Really.
And the Tea Party is about freedom! Freedom for the corporations from those pesky safety and environmental regulations that hurt profits. Oh, yeah and freedom for you to be screwed over by the oligarchs and make you like it.
Pretty much. I love how they pretend to venerate the Constitution but toss it out the window whenever it becomes inconvenient.
Most Americans are pussies now. They don't believe in freedom, or free markets. They enjoyed being bullied and pushed around.
leftists drones... on the left consuming moronic crap. 1. the turning point: Democrats were once for the middle class and and against the cronies. they were in favor of big liberty and against big govt. Remember miranda rights and all sorts of individual rights. Now the cronies own the govt and the Democrats create health care programs which sacrifice the middle class on the alter of forced payments to the corporations. Now democrats try to tell people for whom they should bake a cake? Where is the liberty in that? Republicans naturally screw their base for the cronies... Reagan and Gingrich types supported the taxes payers for a decade but now the party is back to screwing their base for the cronies. The change is that democrats are now doing it too. I can't stress enough that democrats had all the votes... yet they choose insurance company care over single payer.... That should drive anyone who cares about the working class nuts. 2. regarding inequality... Income taxes and death taxes on the 99.5% (those without the assets and the massive income) create the inequality. The cronies get stronger and buy more govt politicians and therefore have to compete less to take in more assets. Anyone with a brain who can understand math... knows... If you wish to fix income inequality you would eliminate the taxes on the 99.5% and take away from the .02%. now if you moronic objection is what about the social safety net?