Democracy as a Way of Life in America: A History by Richard Schneirov & Gaston A. Fernandez

Author:Richard Schneirov & Gaston A. Fernandez [Schneirov, Richard & Fernandez, Gaston A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Theory, Democracy, United States, Civics & Citizenship, Political Ideologies, Political Science, History, General
ISBN: 9781135046026
Google: hg0iAQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18638080
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

The Neoliberal Era

Postindustrial Society in a New Gilded Age

It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed. . . . [O]ur present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.

Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address (1981)

We the people declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth. . . . Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law—for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.

Barack Obama, Second Inaugural Address (2013)

With the perspective drawn from hindsight, the period from the mid-1970s through the first decade of the twenty-first century now appears to many observers to be a second Gilded Age. The term is used because the period resembles in important ways the first Gilded Age during the late nineteenth century. During that time, great fortunes were built by leading industrialists and bankers, dwarfing previous ones accumulated by merchants and slave owners. The economy was marked by frequent financial panics and intense competition among businesses and workers to lower labor cost, and globalization undercut the wages and working conditions of native-born skilled workers. Meanwhile, government officials shamelessly accepted bribes and campaign contributions from wealthy entrepreneurs, allowing them to gain special favors from government, and the Supreme Court routinely struck down legislation protecting the interests of workers and consumers and regulating the behavior of business. Political discourse was dominated by the upper class fear that government would redistribute wealth downward toward the working class.

There is another similarity between the late nineteenth-century Gilded Age and the present period. Though the first Gilded Age was a complex and oftencontradictory mix of trends, it launched an antidemocratic wave, countering (though not eliminating) the democratic trends that marked the Civil War and Reconstruction, including the expansion of the public sector and the policies that led to civil equality and the public participation of the freed slaves. The second Gilded Age inaugurated a reaction against the wave of economic democracy that culminated in the 1960s. That wave took the form of expanded public-sector social spending (pejoratively termed “entitlements”), new regulation of corporate abuses, the granting of civil rights and voting rights to African Americans, and the inclusion in society and culture of women and minorities on an equal basis.

Neoliberalism, Postindustrialism, and the Watershed of the 1970s

The 1970s turn against the second democratic wave resurrected

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