Newsletter Numéro 20                                                                                1 janvier 2004
Douglas Dowd


 The United States Becomes Its Own Worst Enemy  

 
Introduction.
 A survey of only the most recent developments in U.S. domestic and foreign affairs is unnerving; ominously, however, they are an extension of mutually fortifying tendencies that became serious about 30 years ago.  If such processes maintain their momentum, let alone -- as now seems likely -- accelerate, in a decade or so the United States will have ceased to be the nation cherished at home and abroad by so many; our faults will have swept our virtues into the gutter.

  This is not meant to suggest that the United States will become a fascist society; the major nations that have done so, despite their many differences, had in common what has never existed in the United States; namely, a sturdy left movement that could be contained only by institutionalized force and violence -- by "capitalism with the gloves off," as Laski called fascism.

 Rather, the always more irrational and self-destructive society we are becoming bears a sickening resemblance to what was called "the New South" after 1877; as it evolved, all blacks and virtually all whites and the South as a region suffered severe and lasting harm.  Most pertinent for present purposes is that as the South took itself down into that abyss it was fervently supported by virtually all whites.

  Now our entire nation seems on its way toward replicating all too much of that South.  There could not but be important differences in both cause and effect; of course.  What is striking are the already disturbing similarities.

 As those generalizations are supported below, they will lead to the conclusion that although today's toxic mix of conformity, misinformation, consumeristic zeal, and political apathy are taking us toward a "New United States," it will not require the force and violence of fascism.  Nor, except against blacks, were they required in the South.
 
 What has just been suggested could be seen as an outrageously wrong-headed argument for the United States.  Would that it were; that it is all too plausible is the gist of what follows.

 As the analysis proceeds, it will be helpful to keep in mind that from our beginnings as a nation the South was always subject to our federal government and its Constitution:  put differently, the New South's anti-democratic, murderously racist, and increasingly demented society would have been impossible had not the rest of the nation looked the other way -- or applauded.

 It is also important to note 1) that the decades after the Civil War were perhaps the most auspicious ever for the economic development of regions with bountiful natural resources,  2) that the South, with its many forests, its rich soils, its minerals, and its rivers was among the most blessed of U.S. regions, but that 3) up to World War II the South remained "an underdeveloped country."  Almost all southerners, black and white, became poorer with each successive decade after 1865 until World War II's needs reversed that trend,  Unlike other imperialized poor regions, the South's impoverishment was "homespun," produced by a set of processes where economic well-being -- except for at most a tenth of southerners -- was given short shrift, in favor of the fervently shared pathology of "white supremacy."  (Dowd)
 
 The ensuing examination of the South will begin with a brief note concerning the immediate post-bellum years and proceed to a fuller discussion of what, after 1877, came to be called "The New South."  The essay will conclude with the ways in which that South is -- and is not -- coming to be mimicked in our time.

The Mind of the South.
 As many will know, that was the title of the probing 1941 study by W.J. Cash.  He was born and grew up in a cotton mill town in South Carolina, and was a journalist in North Carolina until his early death; thus his focus is upon what was his South.  Some of the characteristics he cites had their beginnings and flourishing in the pre-bellum South.  Then they were taken to new depths, first during the post-bellum military occupation and then, even more so, after 1877.  As you read you may note that to one degree or another, not all, but all too much of what Cash cites can be found in abundance throughout the nation today:

  Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action -- such was the South at its best.  And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues.

  Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism -- these have been its characteristic vices in the past.  And despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.

 To that melancholy list Cash added the idolization and the repression of white women, the constant violation of black girls and women, the bottomless violence against all blacks, and the universal "boyishness" of personal and social existence; all this in a stridently evangelical Christian society whose pervasive sense of sin was matched only by its equally pervasive patterns of "sinful" behavior.  The Devil must have snorted with glee.

 Slavery was the key to the South's wealth and power in both the colonial and national eras; its lasting and deeply pernicious effects were in its shaping of the social and psychological life of the entire nation and, most deeply, that of the South.  Then, after Emancipation, the South's unchecked habituation to its slave past took it toward institutionalized derangement, as all whites became obsessed with maintaining a color-caste society: come what may.

 What came for virtually all white southerners was entrapment in a nightmarish social unreality and, for the vast majority of wage-workers, labor exploitation unmatched in the western world.

 As the evolution of the New South's economic, cultural, and political life is now examined further, it needs repeating that it began with and depended upon the eager cooperation of the North.  That cooperation was codified in what came to be called the "Compromise of 1877," an act that requires elaboration.

 When the South lost the Civil War, it also lost both the muscles of its economy and its power of self-government.  The two most galling elements of the ensuing period of "Reconstruction" were 1) its occupation by the U.S. military and its accompanying economic abuse by northern "carpetbaggers and scalawags," and, pouring salt in the whites' wounds, 2) the extension of normal political and educational rights to the ex-slave population.

 For the whites, Reconstruction's most stinging results were black legislators on the local, state, and national levels and an increasingly literate and "uppity" black population.  Although achieved much less than fulsomely, the new laws were totally unacceptable to the whites, enforceable only by the occupiers.

 During the occupation period, the South, far from becoming once more the rich plantation economy of old, swiftly degenerated into a very poor and minimally productive agricultural economy, farmed by black and white sharecroppers or tenants.  The ante-bellum owners of land still owned most of it; but a significant amount of the land's income was drained away from both owners and workers by the largely northern merchants and moneylenders (the aforementioned "carpetbaggers and scalawags").  A natural accompaniment of this desperate and bitter set of conditions was a heightening of hatred, of lawlessness, and of uncontrolled violence by the impoverished whites against the impoverished blacks.

 The consequent vicious circles of poverty and hopelessness and quasi-anarchy were debased even further by what followed the presidential election of 1876.  One of the ways in which now we move toward aping the South is in the uncanny similarity between the election of 1876 and that of 2000:  Rutherford Hayes, the Republican candidate, received 250,000 fewer popular votes than James Tilden, the Democrat; the deficit for Bush against Gore in 2000 was about 540,000 popular votes.  However, in that the the U.S. population of 1876 was about one-tenth of today's, Tilden's 250,000 edge would translate into at least a two million vote margin of victory.  So, Tilden became president?  Nossireebob, as they say down South.

 After prolonged wheeling and dealing, the election was thrown into the Republican-dominated Congress which -- surprise! -- handed the electoral vote to Hayes.  It was that swindle, arranged by night and by cloud, that was called "The Compromise of 1877."

 It provided the economic and sociopolitical framework within which the "New South" evolved, endured, and worsened up through World War II.  In addition to handing the GOP the presidency, the main provisions of the compromise gave the South what it wanted most:  an end to military occupation and, at least as much, abolition of the civil and human rights of blacks.  In exchange, northern capital gained what it had long craved:  unfettered access to the South's abundant resources and its economic possibilities.

 That soon meant northern-owned railroads, coal mines, steel mills and, critically, hundreds of "whites only" cotton mills meant to drain the dangerous swamps of unemployed whites.  In a replay of what happened to the first generations of factory workers in Britain, the already destitute condition of southern whites was worsened:  as Hobsbawm has shown, British  workers' life spans were reduced by 20 percent in the early decades of the industrial revolution.  Much the same occurred in the New South.

 By 1900 the cotton-mill worker was a pretty distinct type in the South, a type in some respects perhaps inferior to even that of the old poor white, which in general had been his to begin with.  A dead-white skin, a sunken chest, and stooping shoulders were the earmarks of the breed.  Chinless faces, microcephalic foreheads, rabbit teeth, goggling fish eyes, rickety limbs, and stunted bodies abounded -- over and beyond the limit of their prevalence in the countryside....  And the incidence of tuberculosis, of insanity and epilepsy, and, above all, of pellagra, the curious vitamin-deficiency disease which is nearly peculiar to the South, was increasing.

 The cephalic index of southern poor whites is not likely to have changed in a generation or two, but several scholarly studies support Cash's general characterization in painful detail, most notably those of C. Vann Woodward, and Broadus Mitchell.

 In short, that the white South had regained its power of rule perversely meant not improvement but material deterioration for most of its population, white and black; meanwhile, in those same years, an opulent upper class was brought back to life:  Just the conditions one would expect to bring about prolonged conflict  between top and bottom.

 But there was never more than a breath of class struggle in the New South; significantly, when something of that sort did occur with the Populist "uprising" late in the 19th century it was soon done in by the racism of southern white workers against blacks.  Thus did the psychic income of "white supremacy" serve as a high dam to contain and divert the energies and anger of the desperately poor whites; few indeed were the white southerners inclined or daring enough to challenge the sacraments of white supremacy.

 The foregoing components of the New South could be seen as  good sense for those few who ruled and profited from the caste/class system; but for the poor whites to accept "the wages of whiteness" (Roediger) as a substitute for a decent material existence was sheer irrationality and self-destructive; that is but one of the ways in which the nation now apes the South.

 Like racism, the much-praised "frontier spirit" of the United States was manifested in a more concentrated manner in the South than elsewhere, both before and after the Civil War:  The South's penchant for lynchings was displayed even before emancipation, when poor whites lynched other poor whites, not blacks:  slave owners would not, of course, allow their "property" to be destroyed.  (Herskovits)

 After the war, however, random violence by whites against blacks spread like a plague, and increased again after 1877, when blacks were again disenfranchised and the troops had left:  Random beating, hanging, burning, rape, and torture became always more common, and were more likely to be cheered than to be punished.

 The dirt wages and abysmal working conditions of the free white workers in the New South were ideal for factory owners; indeed, they were the magnet attracting northern capital, the prime stimuli for the new factories and their "company towns."  When exploitative cotton mills in New England were closed it was because those in the South, even more exploitative, were opening. So it was that the poor whites of the New South played very much the same role within the United States as have and do the workers in the maguiladoras of Mexico and the sweatshops of China since the 1980s.

 In sum, the South, blessed by abundant resources and cheap labor in an ever-expanding world economy, contrived to create an socioeconomic system which, however gainful it was for a few, was senselessly cruel for the overwhelming majority, and which ultimately brought the entire South to its knees.  With barely a peep from that majority.

 As we now turn to the ongoing evolution of the United States, to repeat, it will not be argued that what we have noted for the South is on its way to being reproduced in an exact mirror image, simply enlarged; rather, that for some similar and for some different reasons, and irrespective of income, wealth, and status, a sizeable majority of the U.S. citizenry is acquiescing in or pushing for a society as irrational as but infinitely more destructive than the New South's.

 The Mind of the United States.  The sharp contrasts between the South at any time and our nation today of course leap to mind. That still leaves important and worrisome similarities; the first of those to be examined now is our tendency toward a self-limiting and destructive conformity.  There are important differences within that area, also; some of them, however, are more often disturbing than encouraging.

Conformism.
 Some of what of southerners have conformed to naturally differs from our national pattern; more of it does not.  Especially is that so in the important area of nationalism and militarism.  True, southerners have outdone and still outdo the rest of the nation in that regard, if only because their defeat in 1865 has not ceased to sting.  Otherwise they are at one with the rest of us, and we with them:  All "good Americans" are nationalistic and accept U.S. militarism as good and proper.

 Nationalism exists almost everywhere and has many sources; for the United States it began with our need to fight for independence.  Our subsequent strong attachment to militarism, however, requires an additional explanation that is difficult to justify:  As we pursued our self-appointed "Manifest Destiny" we also became habituated to celebratory wars, first on this continent and, later, beyond it.

 The historian W.A. Williams notes at least 154 undeclared U.S. military interventions between 1798 and Pearl Harbor.  Then, after the "good war" against Japan and Germany, we resumed our many open and covert military interventions.  These were much stimulated and supported by the engineered fear and militarism of Cold War anti-communism and McCarthyism.  The excitement, heroes, and victories of that history –- Korea and Vietnam excepted -- kept our militarism alive and, despite all, continued to give it "a good name."  Still, as always, those who do not "go along" risk unpopularity and even punishment.

 There have always been other pressures producing our conformism; those to be noted first go back to our earliest days; then the mutually energizing nature and effects of contemporary consumerism and the Cold War will be explored.

 In his Democracy in America (1836) Alexis de Tocqueville expressed his famous enthusiasm for the democracy of the United States; "slavery excepted," he saw U.S. democracy as the world's most firmly established.  At the same time, he registered his disturbance with the ubiquity and strength of our conformism, in marked contrast with his much less democratic France; and he made it clear that over time the democracy and the conformism would contradict each other, with dire effects.

 Tocqueville explained this as a response to the "need to belong" in the hurly-burly of modern societies.  For better and for worse, since he wrote the United States has become considerably more "modern." Then, and even more now, we have been the most modern of all societies; that is, the least bound by social traditions.  As such, and in order to reduce our social isolation, we have always been inclined to march with the crowd.  The direction of that "march" has seldom been decided upon "democratically; today it has become much less so:   Tockqueville's contradiction was resolved in favor of conformity.
  Consumerism.  Writing more 60 years after  Tocqueville, and as the U.S. was taking its very first steps toward mass consumption, the midwesterner Thorstein Veblen underscored another basis for conformism.  He anticipated consumerism (but didn't call it that) with analytical concepts such as "conspicuous consumption, conspicuous display, conspicuous waste" and "emulation."  Under their influence, Veblen argued, we would be led always more to be concerned less with the functions of consumer goods and more with the images they create in the minds of others -- all of whom would be similarly concerned.

 Thus, strong though pressures toward conformism had been in our earlier history, they were much intensified as consumerism moved into its adolescence, critically assisted by the birth in the 1920s of modern advertising.  Average incomes did not allow consumerism’s  general spread until the 1950s; soon after, aided by the universal ownership of TV and the growing use of credit cards, consumerism became becoming a passion; now it dominates our "hearts and minds" and our descent toward self-destructive irrationality well on its way.

 Already as the 1960s began, Paul Baran discerned what lay both behind and ahead of that when he wrote that contemporary capitalism teaches us "to want what we don't need and not to want what we do." Saying nothing further here about what overworked families buy or how much it costs them to borrow, it is important to note what such lives mean to the much idolized "family" in the United States.

 As noted earlier, both parents work more often than not.  Thus there is a need for child care.   Most in the United States would be amazed to learn how deficient we are in that respect compared to most of Europe -- as we are in related area such as health care and concern for the aged and disabled:  In Italy, for example, a pregnant working woman is eligible for paid time off before and after delivery and governmentally funded child care later.  Here, of course, it's each for himself and God for all.  When two working parents do have child care, its costs of course are a subtraction from their "double income."

 Among many other harmful consequences is that on average children watch TV for 5-6 hours a day, with or without child care. What they are watching almost half of that time are ads prodding them to beg their parents for MORE, as they learn to become crazed consumers first and foremost; perhaps only.  (Postman; McChesney)

 The rise of consumerism as a major shaping force required more than the widespread ability to buy and borrow; also necessary were the always more sophisticated media.  The media owe their own great influence to those who pay them lavishly:  companies, politicians. and lobbyists.  What goods and which social policies are sold successfully depend upon the success with which advertising and public relations can socialize us to live by irrational standards:  to buy products presumed to provide us with beauty, or strength, or health, or prestige, or..., something; to support bought and paid for politicians who see voters with the same contempt that businesses see consumers; as putty.

 Which, indeed, we are.  Our malleability as a species is of course the basis for our many strengths as well our weaknesses:  Which of our possibilities are realized and in what combination depend upon the social process within which we exist; the decisive factors are what society rewards or punishes over time and what it does not.  "A decent concern for others," one of our historic standards, has never scored very high.  (Veblen, 1914)  In his earlier-quoted "Theses on Advertising," Paul Baran probed the role of advertising in that "contest":

 It is crucial to recognize that advertising and mass media programs sponsored by and related to it do not to any significant degree create values or produce attitudes but rather reflect existing and exploit prevailing attitudes.  In so doing they undoubtedly re-enforce them and contribute to their propagation, but they cannot be considered to be their taproot.... Advertising campaigns succeed not if they seek to change people's attitudes but if they manage to find, by means of motivation research and similar procedures, a way of linking up with existing attitudes...:  status-seeking, snobbery, social, racial, and sexual discrimination, egotism and unrelatedness to others, envy, gluttony, avarice, and ruthlessness in the drive for self-advancement -- all of these attitudes are not generated by advertising but are made use of and appealed to in the contents of advertising material.  (his emphases)

 Consumerism is senseless enough if seen only as a narrowly economic phenomenon; but it also has major socio-political consequences.  In leading the majority of people to become habituated to "want what they don't need, and not to want what they do," consumerism has also lowered the never high levels of communal feeling and behavior in the United States.  Thus decisions on health, housing, education, public transportation, and the environment -- our "business" -- are left to be dealt with by corporations and their commodified politicians, with profit, not need, as the criterion.

 From modest reformism to relentless neo-conservatism.  From the start of the nation, those who owned and controlled the means of life -- agricultural and mineral resources, factories, transport and communications -- have effectively controlled our social processes.  But the degree of that control and what is controlled have both increased markedly over time -- speeding up after World War II, and explosively so in the 1970s.  Since then the dynamic connections between money and politics, always strong, have risen to their present total dominance, energized by what the business community and its resurgent political allies saw as a set of interacting needs and possibilities.  (Phillips, 2002)

 In what Du Boff has called "the corporate counter-attack" they proceeded to water down or reverse the social changes brought about by "New Deal" and subsequent reforms from the mid-1930s into the 1960s.  In the "prosperity decade" of the 'Twenties, President Coolidge famously said "What's good for business is good for America."  However, when our "rugged individualism" produced a battering depression, that came to be turned around:  What had been bad for America was their fault.

 Thus, for the first time in our history, voices other than those of capital came to be heard in Washington and a connected string of social reforms ensued:  For workers' right "to have unions of their own choosing" and an eight-hour day, for everyone's right for social security, for children's right not to work, for the poor to have public housing, for a more progressive tax structure and, after the war, for health care, civil rights, and environmental protection.

 If "Reconstruction" in the South had been better than nothing, but not enough, so it was for the reforms just noted; although they were modest in both cases, also in both cases they were too much for those who had been accustomed to making all the decisions all of the time, no questions asked.

 But as the 1960s ended, the United States (among other nations) had already begun a new phase of linked economic, political, and social changes -- in technology, the economy's structure and functioning and, in sync, its social attitudes and politics.  Taken together, their nature and their rapidity facilitated a swift and major increase in the always high concentrations of economic and social power by the business community; by the 1970s the ground had been laid for the first stages of a literally "reactionary" the always more rightward shift that now picks up speed as it deepens in its meaning.
 
 What is most striking about our "march to the past" is not that business and the wealthy worked to bring it about but that  it has met with so much popular support -- even though, in the years in which that "march" achieved its most important initial successes, the material life of the average family was worsening. Item:  Between 1977 and 1987, the after-tax income of the median family fell by 20 percent, even though by then both husband and wife were working full-time -- and as the taxes of the top ten percent and of corporations fell, and their after-tax incomes rose substantially.  (Heintz, et al.; Phillips, 1988)  Yet, recent surveys show that  half of "blue-collar workers support Bush.

 The successes of the "corporate counter-attack" were enabled by those of diverse but overlapping constituencies and origins.  Among the most important of those origins, running through our history like a poisonous stream, have been racism and militarism and, both in and outside the New South, an evangelical Christianity.  Each will now be very briefly examined.

 Americanism's dirty closet of racism, militarism, and religious fanaticism. Malcolm X once aptly remarked that "As long as you're south of the Canadian border, you're in the South." The prevalence of racism against blacks and so many others in the United States has meant that the majority of whites were either not supportive of or were in distinct opposition to the attempts to end repression and discrimination against people of color, whether in or outside the South; in addition, perversely, civil rights struggles reawakened previous and created new racists.

 In something like the same pattern, the prolonged movement against the Vietnam war -- and our defeat there -- reinvigorated our traditional militaristic patriotism.  That was made even more attractive than in the past by the Cold War's massive military expenditures -- $9 trillion, 1946-92 -- and its associated good jobs.  That alone made unions and their members almost unanimously supportive of the war, and usually violently abusive to antiwar demonstrators.

 Religious belief is of course a delicate subject; and rightly so.  Some of that delicacy must be foregone, however, when religious belief becomes as important an element in political life as it is now in the United States.  Recent surveys show that well over half of adults in the United States see themselves as evangelical Christians, most especially in the South.  Their ranks include President Bush and Attorney-general Ashcroft, among others in the White House, and at least one Supreme Court Justice.

 Their theology is their private business -- except insofar as that theology and its associated ethics overlap in serious ways with the  politics of the nation and the rights of those who are not evangelical Christians.  The areas of relevance are many; here we concern ourselves only with Bush's foreign policy -- while reminding that it serves as the main rationale for Ashcroft's onslaughts against civil rights.

 Here the concern will not be the ways in which Bush's decisions regarding the Middle East are affected by his and his circle's links with the oil industry; that has nothing to do with religion -- except to the degree that the long-standing support of Israel by us, based on our Cold War strategic interests and oil -- have been heightened by the born-again Christians' conviction that the Second Coming of Christ will occur only if there is an Israel to which he can return.

 Instead, what is of concern here is Bush's constant emphasis that in his actions abroad (and some at home) he is expressing God's will.  Either from ignorance or arrogance (or both), Bush, like his evangelical supporters, seems either not to know or not to care (or both) that the majority of the world's people are not Christians, or that the majority of those who are accept others' religions as legitimate.  It is both appalling and frightening that our hallowed principle of separation of Church and State can be so blatantly violated -- and with so little public reproof.
 
 There is another vital matter to note:  The strengths of none of the three matters just discussed would have come to be what they are today without the critical role played by the media -- and, of course, their paymasters.  Through their strengths and techniques the various media have made it easy to keep up a constant flow of misinformation and distortions concerning all of these and related matters; they also make it easier and, because of their strength, even more worrisome, to understand the growth of mass susceptibility to rightist arguments.

 All that said, the quantum leap in our irrationality remains only partially explained by the foregoing; they are the necessary but in themselves not sufficient conditions.  That "sufficiency" required a persuasive leader with an "All-American" voice.  It was found; more accurately, it was created.  It was Ronald Reagan.

 Politics as entertainment; and vice versa.  If one were looking for someone to personify the negative side of the "American Dream" and to do so both charmingly and persuasively, Reagan would win hands down.  His charm needn't be described, it is him; but his  persuasiveness required "grooming."  (Wills)

 Reagan was 35 when World War II ended.  Before that he was a midwestern radio sports announcer.  From there he went on to films, TV, and politics.  He had been a "New Deal liberal" in the 1930s.  The key years shaping and changing his politics were those soon after the war, beginning with his role as spokesman for General Electric before civic clubs such as Rotary and the Elks,

 General Electric became a giant during World War I; by the 1920s it had become the most ideological of the major corporations, most visibly in its many-sided -- and successful -- attempts to curb unionism.  In 1952, as TV ownership was spreading, GE had Reagan serve as its "master of ceremonies" on its weekly -- and deservedly popular -- General Electric Theater. From the rubber chicken circuit on Reagan, smiling and joking all the way, changed his politics from liberal to conservative to reactionary -- although there was little to joke about when, as head of the Screen Actors' Guild he went far to weaken the union, cooperating with McCarthyism against his union's members and providing "names" to the FBI.  (Navasky; Wills)

 Thus began Reagan's political career in, of course, schizophrenic California (my state) which, in exaggeration of the nation itself, "was never just the golden dream of riches and bountiful nature, but always a scene of exploitation and false promises, indifference and ruthlessness, a kind of hollow core." (Didion)

 The state had long been sharply divided between  conservative/ right and liberal/left.  The split widened in the 1960s, as "Berkeley" became the symbol for both sides and, as well, served as the political take-off for Reagan to become governor and then president -- and, it seems fair to say, our most popular president ever.

 And fittingly so.  Reagan personified and nourished the ugly but also most functional side of the "American character" -- its racism, its selfish individualism, its dangerous profligacy regarding both society and nature, its militaristic patriotism and abiding brutality, its confusion of sentimentality with compassion and, most "American" of all, Reagan did all of this in the name of one or another of our high ideals, accompanied by a wisecrack:  Student protestors?  "It's time for a little blood in the streets."  The environment?  "See one redwood and you've seen 'em all."   And then there was his continuous stream of defamation of the poor and of welfare, with their thinly-veiled appeals to racism.

 Reagan's years of work for GE taught him "to say his political lines" and gave him his ticket to enter the political arena as a contender.  It had come to be realized that his genial personality and fluid character could sell the politics of hard conservatism as the milk of human kindness.  His backers in California, in order to prep him for the governorship, put him in the hands of the Behavior Sciences Corporation of Southern California.  Their job? "To work on the whole concept of the man." (Wills)  Call for George Orwell.

 From there to the White House was an easy ride for Reagan.  Its only bumps had to do with the air travel:  His first flight ever (when he was an actor) was the 20-minute flight from Los Angeles to Catalina Island, a place for dancing, swimming, and gambling.  Upon landing, terrified, he swore he would never fly again.  He was persuaded that he could not make a successful run for a national post without doing so.  The rest is history.

 As Bush II announces his policies and reads his carefully-crafted lines in their artfully-staged settings, one cannot help but note that, although with a different personality and mentality, he too is "groomed" or "handled" -- indeed by some of the same  individuals and interests as Reagan.  Which brings us to contemporary developments at home and abroad.

 Uncle Sam as Emperor and Plutocrat,  Our ongoing foreign policies have been given the name "preemption" by the White House; the domestic policies, as will be seen, are a mix of Hoover's stinginess and of Reagan's fiscal strategy called "starve the beast" by his advisors. (See below.)  Taken together, those policies, their probable futures, and the lack of effective resistance to them portend a horrendous future, socially and militarily.  First, foreign policy.

 If Hoover's spirit has been revived for domestic policies -- setting swollen deficits aside -- so has McKinley's for aggressive expansion abroad, in a way that makes McKinley seem a shrinking violet.

 President from 1897 until 1901, McKinley proudly led the nation into the Spanish-American War.  How our takeover of Cuba was sold with McKinley's version of "weapons of mass destruction" -- "the sinking of the Maine" -- will be examined later.  Here we note how McKinley, a fervent Christian in the same vein as Bush, explained his "preemptive" decision to invade the Philippines  and, for half a century, to occupy the islands.  Bush's advisors could have, perhaps did, learn from what could be seen as a dress rehearsal for Iraq:

 I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night.  And then one night it came to me this way...:  1) We could not give /the Philippines/ back to Spain -- that would be cowardly and dishonorable.  2) We could not turn them over to France or Germany, our commercial rivals in the Orient -- that would be bad business and discreditable.  3)  We could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government, and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there....  So 4) there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.... And then I went to bed and went sleep and slept soundly.  (quoted in Zinn)

 We fought there for four years, killing 2-300,000 Filipinos:  "to save them"; as later in Vietnam; as now in Iraq.

 Since Bush has been in office we have initiated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and, by our disgracefully persistent economic, military, and political support of Israel, we have allowed that war to become deeper, more destructive, and a threat to whatever peace still exists in the Middle East -- or, for that matter in the entire Muslim world; for, ultimately, the whole world.

 By now, it has become clear to most of the world and to a good portion of our own people -- irrespective of their other political positions -- that the United States is behaving as it has often accused others of being:  as "a rogue nation."  Although there have been many substantial protest demonstrations here and even more abroad, they have had no effect upon our unilateral policies.

 Domestically, even the briefest summary is forbidding:  The economic vitality of the U.S. economy depends upon a healthy global economy and vice versa. with ourselves as "consumer -- and trusted borrower -- of last resort," always importing considerably more than we export, as we run up our foreign debt at the rate of $500 billion annually.

 As I write (December, 2003) the U.S. economy is experiencing growth at the rate of 8-9 percent, and big increases in "labor productivity."  But few expect the recovery to stop being "jobless"; and the rising productivity is due in critical part to workers having to work more hours with the same pay. (Uchitelle)  That trend goes back to the 1990s, and now speeds up.  Meanwhile, sluggishness prevails over the rest of the world (except China and India) and, just as they need to sell us more, our debt-strangled consumers and job problems and the record low of the dollar against the euro and yen make it likely that our imports will soon level off or decline.
 
 In addition, the extraordinary and deliberate deficits of the past three (and oncoming) years and their major tax reductions for the richest, have increased the nervousness of those holding our foreign debt while, at the same time, doing nothing positive for the economy except a hiccough of consumer spending.

 Which takes us to "starve the beast" as the standard for socioeconomic policy. That was the deliberate strategy in the Reagan years, revealed as such by his budget chief after he resigned. (Stockman)  Today the strategy has been revived and become even more vicious -- and even more successful.  As Ben Bagdikian points out,

 The plan is open and even given a name:  "Starve the Beast." The "Beast" is the United States government.  The starvation is to have the government so loaded with debt or other limiting obligations that it makes it easier to cancel a wide range of government programs, or so cripple them they will not work.  These are programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other fixtures that mainly benefit the middle-class Americans, environmental protections, anti pollution, and the entire range of programs the neo-conservatives wish to privatize or cancel.

 The business interests supporting these policies seem to have forgotten, or never acknowledged, that over time their profits depend upon buoyant markets; that buoyant market require consumers with money to spend and the ability to go on borrowing.  With wages stalled, jobs lost, overtime pay a fond memory, and household debt breaking new records, business will soon be reminded of that rule.

 Thus it is that the most threatening element today centers on debt.  U.S. consumers are "breathing hard" not only because their jobs are in trouble, but because at the same time so are their credit balances:  their mortgage and credit card indebtedness have ceased being an aid to living better and become instead a tightening noose:  The average household owed 50 percent of its monthly income in 1955, 80 percent by 1985, 100 percent ten years later; recently it has touched 120 percent; significantly, in the 1950s, that debt was almost entirely mortgage debt; now credit-card debt is racing to catch up.

 As the latter rose, it was because families were buying all too many "things they did not need"; but recent surveys show they are using credit cards to pay for things they do need:  health care, education, daily transportation, child care....  Moreover, lurking in the shadows of that predicament is a horrific imperative:  debt must continue to rise, lest the entire economy collapse because it has not.

 That says nothing about the fragility created by the equally mountainous trillions of debt of financial and nonfinancial corporations.  As all debt levels continued to rise in the late 1990s, Business Week's lead article (11-20-99) was entitled "Is the United States Building a Debt Bomb?"  Now we know the answer: You bet.  And betting is indeed what businesses do.  As finance has come to surpass production as the main sphere of the economy -- since 1989, corporate profits have always been less than interest -- finance has itself come to be dominated by global 24/7 speculation; that is, betting.

 The sum and substance of associated worries of our domestic condition, especially if there is a prolonged period of economic weakness, could produce a decent social movement; in the present it is more likely to make it easier to exacerbate our tendencies toward irrationality and self-destruction:  as in the New South.  In some important respects, today's United States is better-protected against such developments than was the South; in other ways, however, we are considerably less secure.  The reference is to the interacting roles of our militarism, the media, and the cultivation of fear.

 Until about a century ago, the media were influential for only a minority of the population, because of general illiteracy and low subsistence incomes; now all are shaped by the several media:  newspapers and magazines, radio, TV, and film.  The media exist to make money; in principle, there are many ways in which to make money; in practice, the industry's choices have moved unerringly toward pandering to the worst in us:  to our anger, envy, gluttony, avarice, lust, pride, and sloth -- the "seven deadly sins" -- and to those just as deadly, fear, shame, and hate.  It makes lots of money, so it must be OK.

 Aided by Hearst's "yellow press" and cooperative deceptions and lies in and by the government, it was easy for McKinley to take us to war, first in Cuba, then the Philippines.  Between then and Vietnam, the United States intervened militarily many times -- not least in wresting what became Panama from Colombia, and our long occupation of Nicaragua.   All that plus the endless hype of the Cold War made it easy indeed for Johnson to bully almost the entire Congress to vote for the fallacious Tonkin Gulf Resolution, so that our previous years of fighting in Vietnam could be, so to speak, licensed.  It has been easiest of all for Bush.

 He confronts a population not only socialized and softened up by a half century of militaristic propaganda, but one which, for the first time in our history -- except for Pearl Harbor, a colony 2000 miles away -- has suffered an attack from abroad.  And we are a people that can be easily terrified.  By constantly invoking 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the administration has been able to keep the public's attention away from all else.  If anyone knows that, it is Bush's tight circle in the White House.

 There are terrorists in the world, and they have done and doubtless will do harm to us and others for the foreseeable future.  What also needs to be seen as "doubtless" is 1) that the threat of terrorism is persistently magnified and distorted by the Bush administration, 2) that terrorist activities have been heightened rather than lessened by both past and, even more, by present U.S. policies, and 3) that the steady din of terrorism provides the main basis for Bush's re-election -- and, when deemed desirable, additional "preemptive attacks."

 In short, we seem to be approaching a precipice more perilous than that over which the South threw itself,  Given the enormous set of differences between that South and our present, it could seem ludicrous to make any comparison whatsoever between such a weak region of the 19th century and such a powerful nation in the present.  But not entirely.  It is instructive to look back at what happened to that other powerful, that other advanced nation of the 1920s:  Germany.

 Ask most in the United States to characterize pre-Nazi Germany and it would be something of the order of "an uptight country of flagrant nationalism and spike-helmeted soldaten, its people addicted to beer, sausage, and sauerkraut":  "Krauts," we call them.

 But from the mid-1920s until the early 1930s, Germany was rightly seen by western artistic, scientific, engineering, and musical worlds as "the peak of western civilization."  All flocked to Berlin, magnetized.  Then, after the election 1933, as though by a evil magician's wand, Germany permitted its President Hindenburg to give the chancellorship to Adolf Hitler (whose party had received only a third of the votes).

 In 1941, as Cash was writing his book, the German socio-psychoanalyst Erich Fromm was writing his Escape from Freedom. In it, he sought to explain how his country could fall from that peak to becoming history's foul pit -- and could do so with a large majority who grudgingly accepted, unblinkingly supported, or hotly embraced the irrationalities, authoritarianism, and massive atrocities of German fascism.

  Fromm's explanation, which combined and went beyond both Freud and Marx, to be sure, included factors  absent in the United States:  countless embittered war veterans who, having expected to win easily, had lost the bloodiest war in history (up to then); a people that saw its country's economic assets and territories, even a big slice of its population, taken away by the scandalous Treaty of Versailles; who went through the most spectacular inflation ever, 1918-1923, which shot prices up four trillion times (with accompanying miseries); a nation whose politics, wracked by divisions which always deepened, made effective government impossible -- all that and more.  (Brady, 1933; Gerschenkron)

 There is little of that to be found here, today.  What justifies looking at Germany now is not only that it was an admirable, proud, and respected society which, nonetheless, shot toward the depths, but that beneath the developments of their time and ours are troublesome similarities.  I recapitulate only the most relevant, all discussed earlier:  abiding militarism and conformism, a tendency to look for and find scapegoats:  in Germany, the Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals and Communists; for the New South, the blacks of the New South; for us, here and now, the harsh attitudes and treatment of the poor, the old and disabled, people of color or the "wrong" religion – and now, manna from hell,  "suspected terrorists."

 But Fromm, for his Germany, adds what could be read as descriptive of our own time and place:  "Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or destroyer."   In today's finely-spun vocabulary we have softer words than exploitation, boredom and triviality, to characterize the typically Overworked American and Overspent American. (Schor)  But, and in ways different from Germany, they are hard at work here, and have been for many decades.
As they have done and do so, we have become dangerous to ourselves and to others.

 Without underestimating the horrors either of the New South or of Hitler's Germany, it remains quite possible, now even probable, that the United States is taking itself and the world toward an otherwise preventable economic disaster,  environmental destruction, and a chain of wars -- up to and including the use of "small" nuclear weapons and, thus toward what should be an unthinkable third world war.

 Impossible?  No.  Improbable?  That depends,  It depends upon whether the existing millions of us who have taken the "American dream" seriously can find our way to also take politics more seriously.  That means more than voting; it means creating a movement that gives us something to vote for, as well as against -- a movement ranging from the moderate center to the radical left, one that knows we must work very hard and very well to make this nation what it has never been and that now becomes less so: a nation of, by, and for the people.  Now. Instead, this nation and much of the world are ruled over by a handful of insensate, disgustingly rich, and immensely powerful bullies -- with all too much acceptance, support, or enthusiasm.

 We must disenthrall ourselves.  So spoke Lincoln as the nation faced its first major crisis.  Deep and bloody though that crisis was, it was pale in comparison with what confronts us at home and abroad today, both because of what is and is not being done.

 From its first days in the 1970s until now, the processes taking us to this point were supported every inch along the way; more to the point, also along that way, they have received always less, rather than more, effective opposition.  How is it that "We the People" could not "get our act together" -- or even more gravely, that so few ever made a serious effort to do so?   Some of the doleful story has been noted above; more of it needs telling here.
 
 The giant corporations and their effective cohorts of non-business groups have certain strengths that the rest of us do not: plenty of money to buy politicians and hire lobbyists and pay for "institutional" advertising (made tax-deductible by those same politicians) -- where "institutional means selling their company or their ideas, rather than their product; on the other side, they have and use the power to hire and fire workers who raise their ire.  In addition, their political cohorts -- pro-gun, militaristic, anti-poor, conscious and unconscious racists, "born-again Christians -- are both more inclined and more able to raise money and organize votes than their would be opponents.

 That is, us:   moderates, liberals, and radicals.  We are rarely as enduringly passionate as the gunners, et al.  Nor has the obvious frailty of unions helped.  In addition to the flabbiness due to achieved comforts and consumerism, much of the weakness of today’s center/left is due to economic processes.  Despite all the hoopla concerning the great good times of "the New Economy," the 1990s were in fact very difficult times for workers, even those who managed to keep their jobs.

 Such troubles began to appear with the double-digit unemployment rates of the late 1970s -- followed, in the 1980s by "downsizing and outsourcing" of globalization.  That continues to increase; and, in addition to bringing higher profits for giant transnational companies it has also increased their power over workers.  This was not and is not shown accurately in official unemployment rates.  Such rates not only understate the number without work, or those on part-time who seek and need full-time jobs, but fail to give even a nod to those whose jobs have deteriorated from skilled, with good incomes and benefits, to unskilled, and a distinct fall in pay and benefits -- and in dignity.  (Bluestone/Harrison)

  "Labor productivity" took great leaps upward in those same years.  In the huzzahs celebrating that -- rightly so, from the viewpoint of business -- it is rarely noted that much of it then (and even more, now) was due to the increase of hours worked without pay:  less politely, by an increase in worker exploitation:  In 1999 – and now the numbers are higher -- the average U.S. worker put in 260 hours more per year (= six weeks) than in 1989, with nothing like a proportionate increase in pay.  (Business Week, 12-6-99)  For CEOs, however, it was something else:  From the 1980s through the 1990s, the ratio of their after-tax incomes to the average worker's rose from under 100 to 1 to over 400 to 1.  Even 100 to 1 is monstrous:  In Japan the ratio was 7 to 1.  (Gordon)

 That was only a beginning; now, as our vocabulary has added the term "jobless recovery" to "downsizing and outsourcing," there has been an acceleration in the replacement of well-paid workers here by very low-paid workers in China, India, Indonesia, and Mexico -- as the job market comes to be increasingly part-time-temp with no benefits, whether in offices, factories, schools, or universities.

 By the late 1990s another new term had come into use:  "concessionary unionism."  Already weak unions, further weakened by ongoing developments, now go into negotiations prepared to bargain away jobs in exchange for maintaining benefits for those remaining: for a while).

 Those workers who have already been hurt, taken together with the large and growing number whose prospects for ever having a decent job are dim indeed, could become part of a vigorous workers' political effort.  In the past they did:  the most significant steps toward unionization in the United States began at the very bottom of the depression of the 1930s, when official unemployment was 25 percent.

 Despite all, which included losing jobs, being beaten or even killed, whether on the waterfront in San Francisco, the automobile plants in Michigan, or the rubber factories in Ohio, there were strikes and occupied factories every year until the war -- one of them, in San Francisco, the first and only general strike in the U.S.  And, although nobody would have thought anything like that was possible in 1933, the workers won, year after year, made easier by the needs of maximum production during World War II.
 
 With few exceptions, most notably the farm workers in the 1960s and the service workers' union in the past decade or so, there has been little in the way of vigorous organizing since the 1970s.  Instead, something like the opposite. Rather than organizing to strengthen themselves, workers have been allowed (or been forced) to let union membership decline from its peak in the 1950s of over a third of all workers in private industry to less than a tenth today.

 The general reason for such a dramatic reversal is the equally dramatic alteration of outlook engendered by an upsurge of long-standing militarism and racism, plus intensifying consumerism. This has enabled those in power to displace all sense and feeling in many ways, above all, most recently, by pumping up fears about terrorism.  The Bush administration will not relent, nor will it fail, unless forced to by a popular movement whose quality and strength must go beyond any previous achievement.
 
 To build such a movement we must understand why so many of our people have become what their counterparts were called under Hitler:  "Good Germans" -- those who, though they may have been uncomfortable in the early days of Nazism's villainy, over time became either hardened to it or, all too often, its silent supporters.  If, as, and when we come to fit that description, it will be because we have allowed ourselves to be dehumanized and demoralized by a social process that brings out the worst in us, while suppressing the best in us.  Whether, in the last analysis, that is or is not "our fault" will become irrelevant; as will we.

 There are degrees of demoralization, however.  It seems reasonable to assert that at least 10 percent of our people -- irrespective of gender, color, ethnicity, religion, blue, white, or "no" collar -- are still in effective control of their principles and hopes; those of us who have been lucky enough to find work that is neither degrading nor without some degree of satisfaction, and which is relatively uncoerced.  But most others, whether poor, comfortable, or rich, are living "lives of quiet /or not so quiet/ desperation."

 Those in the fortunate "10 percent" (or more, one may hope) who are conscious of and disgusted by our country's rapid degeneration, have not only the morale but the obligation to go beyond disgust toward serious political work; in doing so, we make it more likely that others' morale may be recovered, as has happened in other times and places.

 If, as and when we do, and in addition to learning to become much more serious about our politics, we must also unlearn what groups left of center have honed almost to perfection:  we must cease to struggle against each other more effectively than against our common enemy.  Competition can be useful in a commodity market; practiced in the face of the future now unfolding, it is a deadly and self-inflicted disease.

 In 1937, when German fascism was already full-throated, Robert A. Brady wrote what remains the best English language study of its origins and nature:  The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism.  On its title page he chose to quote Shakespeare's Lear:

 If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
 Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,
 It will come,
 Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
 Like monsters of the deep.


 Time had already run out for the Germans; it has begun to do so in the United States.
 

________________
References
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Brady, R. A.  1933.  The Rationalization of German Industry.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.
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Cash, W.J.  1941.  The Mind of the South.  New York:  Knopf.
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