The "Grand Bargain" Between Left and Right in America

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Sometime in the 1980s, it seems that an unspoken "grand bargain" somehow emerged between the Left and Right in America. The Left would get control of culture and education and drive the historical narrative, in such a way that Martin Luther King Jr. was "canonized" and the Stonewall Riots of 1969, demonstrations by members of the gay community against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York, became a world-historical event.

Meanwhile, on the Right, "real existing capitalism" would face little economic or ideological opposition, resulting, within a few decades, of some Chief Executive Officers of corporations making up to 500 times that of the average worker, while tens of millions lost decent jobs and ended up working at minimum wage at places like Burger King and Walmart.

My question is: how exactly did this come about?

Well, to quote one wag, "the rebels of the New Left took over, not the economy, but the English Department" -- in other words, university humanities faculties. In the United States, as many of these elite, selective colleges were in rural communities, far from manufacturing and heavy industry, the students able to afford tuition, including on-campus living, running into the tens of thousands of dollars. So these "tenured radicals" ended up teaching the children of the well-off, rather than the poor and working-class in the big cities whom they never even saw.

Their upper class students regurgitated all of the dogmas fed to them, on tests and term papers, but after graduation they went off to positions in the "real world" of business, where all of the "critical" and "subversive" materials could be conveniently shelved, so to speak the way earlier generations ignored their Sunday School lessons. Few would become community organizers or labour union officials!

Perhaps the mistake made by the New Left was in focusing on identity politics and "diversity," rather than socialist economics, the forte of the pre-1950s Marxists and social democrats. (The collapse of Soviet Communism also made it harder to advocate socialism of any sort.) In this they have succeeded: affirmative action and other legislation helped put an end to overt discrimination and opened the doors to previously marginalized ethnic and gender groups. African-Americans, women, and others could now, as individuals, gain access to positions previously denied to them.

As one academic has observed, "Maybe one part of the story is that nothing the left wanted was incompatible with what a capitalist state requires. It can't hurt matters that the same people running the economy are coastal elites, highly educated, with no deeply embedded phobias about race or gender."

So, to a large extent, today’s American economic rulers include more people who, in generations past, would not have been able to "make it" into a wealthier stratum of society. The problem though, is that the economic gap between this entire class of people, and those less fortunate, has become a chasm.

The top one per cent of Americans earn twenty per cent of all income, twice the 1980 figure (and they now pay far less in taxes).The rich continue to do well even in hard times -- CEO pay in 2012 increased by sixteen per cent over the previous year, with the median compensation package now at $15.1 million.

Incomes rose more than 11 per cent for the top one per cent of earners during the economic recovery, but not at all for everybody else, according to data produced by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley.

For the other 99 per cent, earnings declined by 0.4 percent. This ongoing increase in income disparity is not unrelated to the fact that the percentage of workers in unions stands at 11.3 per cent, its lowest level since 1916.

U.S. median household income, adjusted for inflation, has fallen 4.4 per cent in the last four years. The country still has two million fewer jobs than before the Great Recession, and most jobs created since have been at the low end of the wage scale. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

While four million homes have been foreclosed since 2007, and millions of others are "underwater," meaning their proprietors owe more on their mortgages than the current market value of their houses, a one-floor residence in a building on New York’s Park Ave. recently sold for $23 million. Although there have been a number of protests, such as the "Occupy" movement, they have accomplished little and petered out.

Some studies suggest that upward social mobility has now slowed so much in the United States that it is worse than in many European countries and Canada. The "American dream" is becoming, for far too many, just that -- a dream. And the large cohort of left-wing academics and intellectuals can't seem to do much about it.