Portside

The initiatives of the New Deal and FDR's Second Bill of Rights represented less a permanent triumph of the welfare state or a model for a progressive way forward than a unique combination of non replicable circumstances, including a temporary cessation of enduring tensions involving race, immigration, culture, class, and individualism, which served to sustain a pale social democratic reform for just a few decades. What followed instead was today's new Gilded Age.

Reading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, I was reminded of the snapshot that Oxfam offered us early this year: 62 billionaires now have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population, while the richest 1% own more than the other 99% combined...In 2010, it took 388 of the super-rich to equal the holdings of that bottom 50%. At this rate...by 2030, just the top 10 billionaires might do the trick. [*]

The book under review examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts by workers to resist and the housebreaking of a long-running anti-capitalist ethos from imaginative, frenzied opposition to diffuse, angry, but ultimate accommodation. While a residual 19th century fight-back culture built the CIO and defended the New Deal into the 1960s, it lacked the same emancipatory charge it had earlier, and unions shifted to cautious monitors of the working class

With its numerous religious awakenings and repeated instances of religiosity as political theater, it's easy to forget US civic life is secular. Author Kevin Kruse argues that the effort to ground political rights in spiritual authority and not in democratic discussion and decision-making originated with a coterie of corporate heads, right-wing politicians, reactionary pastors and cultural icons as a bulwark against progressive politics and New Deal legislation.