Decline and fall: how American society unravelled

[Adsos Letter]

source:
The Guardian
George Packer
Wednesday 19 June 2013 12.47 ED

In or around 1978, America's character changed. For almost half a century, the United States had been a relatively egalitarian, secure, middle-class democracy, with structures in place that supported the aspirations of ordinary people. You might call it the period of the Roosevelt Republic. Wars, strikes, racial tensions and youth rebellion all roiled national life, but a basic deal among Americans still held, in belief if not always in fact: work hard, follow the rules, educate your children, and you will be rewarded, not just with a decent life and the prospect of a better one for your kids, but with recognition from society, a place at the table.

This unwritten contract came with a series of riders and clauses that left large numbers of Americans – black people and other minorities, women, gay people – out, or only halfway in. But the country had the tools to correct its own flaws, and it used them: healthy democratic institutions such as Congress, courts, churches, schools, news organisations, business-labour partnerships. The civil rights movement of the 1960s was a nonviolent mass uprising led by black southerners, but it drew essential support from all of these institutions, which recognised the moral and legal justice of its claims, or, at the very least, the need for social peace. The Roosevelt Republic had plenty of injustice, but it also had the power of self-correction.

Americans were no less greedy, ignorant, selfish and violent then than they are today, and no more generous, fair-minded and idealistic. But the institutions of American democracy, stronger than the excesses of individuals, were usually able to contain and channel them to more useful ends. Human nature does not change, but social structures can, and they did.

At the time, the late 1970s felt like shapeless, dreary, forgettable years. Jimmy Carter was in the White House, preaching austerity and public-spiritedness, and hardly anyone was listening. The hideous term "stagflation", which combined the normally opposed economic phenomena of stagnation and inflation, perfectly captured the doldrums of that moment. It is only with the hindsight of a full generation that we can see how many things were beginning to shift across the American landscape, sending the country spinning into a new era.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled

[DURHAM D]

1. Link?

[alsame]

2. Can you add the link, please? I'd like to

read the entire article. Thanks

[Adsos Letter]

3. ...whoops...

link added.

[alsame]

4. Thanks :) nt

[daleanime]

5. K&R....

nt

[snot]

6. Hmmm . . .

"This deterministic view is undeniable but incomplete. What it leaves out of the picture is human choice. A fuller explanation of the Unwinding takes into account these large historical influences, but also the way they were exploited by US elites – the leaders of the institutions that have fallen into disrepair. America's postwar responsibilities demanded co-operation between the two parties in Congress, and when the cold war waned, the co-operation was bound to diminish with it. But there was nothing historically determined about the poisonous atmosphere and demonising language that Gingrich and other conservative ideologues spread through US politics. These tactics served their narrow, short-term interests, and when the Gingrich revolution brought Republicans to power in Congress, the tactics were affirmed. Gingrich is now a has-been, but Washington today is as much his city as anyone's.

"It was impossible for Youngstown's steel companies to withstand global competition and local disinvestment, but there was nothing inevitable about the aftermath – an unmanaged free-for-all in which unemployed workers were left to fend for themselves, while corporate raiders bought the idle hulks of the mills with debt in the form of junk bonds and stripped out the remaining value. It may have been inevitable that the constraints imposed on US banks by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 would start to slip off in the era of global finance. But it was a political choice on the part of Congress and President Bill Clinton to deregulate Wall Street so thoroughly that nothing stood between the big banks and the destruction of the economy.

"Much has been written about the effects of globalisation during the past generation. Much less has been said about the change in social norms that accompanied it. American elites took the vast transformation of the economy as a signal to rewrite the rules that used to govern their behaviour: a senator only resorting to the filibuster on rare occasions; a CEO limiting his salary to only 40 times what his average employees made instead of 800 times; a giant corporation paying its share of taxes instead of inventing creative ways to pay next to zero. There will always be isolated lawbreakers in high places; what destroys morale below is the systematic corner-cutting, the rule-bending, the self-dealing."

The author fails to grasp that elites didn't just take the transformation as a "signal"; they engineered it, undertaking and carrying out a long-term, highly successful campaign to "change . . . social norms" through their acquisition and control of the media, the financial system, elections, and education.

[malthaussen]

9. Yeah, and I have a problem with...

"This deterministic view is undeniable." In fact, I have a problem with the author's depiction of the "default setting" of American society. What may be true from one seat is false from another.

-- Mal

[Dustlawyer]

10. +1,000! It's great to see someone else that gets it! The rich and corporations own the politicians

and thus write the laws. They have been manipulating and brainwashing "We the People" for 30 years. The hyper partisanship is merely a tool to get us (the ones who read and follow politics) to treat our identified Party as a sports team where we overlook the "fouls" committed by our "team" except to complain that they are "spineless" as if Democrats had a genetic condition instead of saying they sold out!
If OWS wanted to be effective, the only issue they should push would be for COMPLETE CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM (CCFR)! It is the root cause of our problems. In a truly Representative Democracy we would not be talking about the NSA spying on us;
We would already have gay marriage; sensible gun regulations; jobs bill passed; immigration passed;Glass Steigal in place;deficit control; safe social security, Medicare/Medicaid......
Also, we would not have allowed the consolidation of our mass media to 6 companies who distort and lie about the news.
We would not allow the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to plant free, fake newspapers outside of the Courthouses where jurors are selected (check out the Southeasttexasrecord.com for an example of the slanted reporting against Plaintiffs and their attorneys). It should be jury tampering!

We do not have Representative Democracy and have not had it for quite some time!

[deutsey]

11. I haven't read it yet, but I agree with you that the elites deliberately engineered

a massive reaction to the rebellions of the '60s and early '70s.

[KoKo]

12. Agree... It's a pretty thin article. Maybe his book goes into more detail.

[Auggie]

14. It was Reagan's "Government is the problem" mantra ... which was written by capitalists

[KoKo]

15. It's been a sad progression downwards for America.. (which is not the HOMELAND)

just saying.

[RobertEarl]

7. 1978

The era of cheap oil ended. People were either scared shitless or they determined to become more reasonable and conscious living, free individuals.

Morning in America as propagandized by the Reaganites, was the religion for the scared in that it falsely assured them they could go on living a highly consumptive and irresponsible lifestyle.

Carter had told us that we had to change and be more conservative with our consumption. That meme, mixed with the metaphors of the time, just messed with people's heads and drove them into the Reaganites arms, where they felt safe from reality.

Ever since it has been a fight between reality of limits and the old ways of get it while the getting is good; me first; oil addictive personalities.

[KoKo]

16. Good Point...and as a person who lived through that time..in retrospect...agree. n/t

[bemildred]

19. Yep. That was when it started, the reaction that brought us here.

Volker did his part too.

[LongTomH]

8. The article by George Packer is worth reading, as well as the review of the book by Sukhdev Sandhu

The Packer article is a short summary of his book. There's an accompanying review by Sukhdev Sandhu, which asks: "Where is the outrage?"

[KoKo]

13. Sandu's Review is a very good read...A Snip:

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer – review

George Packer does a fine job of charting US decline. But where's the anger?
by Sukhdev Sandu

One of the odd things about American news programmes is how little American news they feature. Typhoons and hurricanes, crazies and lone gunmen, Barack Obama staging a press conference, 10 seconds about the Middle East, a famous actor doing something scandalous, back to the weather: all this giddy fragmentation is further punctuated by so many commercial breaks or mentions of what's coming up after those breaks that it can be hard to tell the difference between reportage and retail. America itself – its landscapes, rhythms, textures – is more invoked than evoked. A mere brand or sign. A tool to manufacture a togetherness that doesn't exist.

George Packer's new book is about this missing America. Spanning three decades, it's a history of disassemblage, a chronicle of a nation where the "structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape – the farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories of the Mahoning Valley, Florida subdivisions, California schools". It's also a threnody, a lamentation about the silence, at least in political circles, around those collapsing structures: "An old city can lose its industrial foundation and two-thirds of its people, while all its mainstays – churches, government, business, charities, unions – fall like building flats in a strong wind, hardly making a sound."

Packer, a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of The Assassins' Gate, a 2005 study of the US war in Iraq, is also a novelist. The Unwinding is strongly influenced by the USA trilogy (1930-36) of John Dos Passos, a political radical in his early days and a literary modernist, who famously claimed that "Mostly USA is the speech of the people".

Like him, Packer constructs his factual narrative from the stories of a broad range of characters: Madison-raised Dean Price is hauled out of his mixed high school by his racist father, weans himself on self-help books and opens up a slew of truck stops, convenience stores and burger joints before becoming an evangelist for biofuel. He is equal parts dreamer, indomitable entrepreneur, utopian Del Boy.

Then there's Jeff Connaughton, an idealistic lobbyist, White House lawyer and former aide to Joe Biden who recalls in savage detail how his initial admiration for Obama's vice-president turned to disgust, not just because of Biden's foibles (cribbing from a Neil Kinnock speech, mistreating people close to him) but more importantly because of his absolute failure to push through legislation that would have broken up those national banks whose greed and corruption brought America to the brink of economic meltdown. Packer has a great deal of time for these men, and for Tammy Thomas, a black American woman from Ohio who grew up taking care of an alcoholic mother who was in and out of jail for drugs, fraud and robberies. Somehow, in spite of the steel mills in her home town closing down and having to raise her children in a gang-colonised neighbourhood, she becomes a community organiser. Less warmly – though by no means acerbically – portrayed is Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and libertarian co-founder of PayPal, who finances projects involving seasteading and reversing human ageing.

[Brigid]

17. Love the last lines:

"Once the social contract is shredded, once the deal is off, only suckers still play by the rules."

[4dsc]

18. 30 years of failed conservative economics at work here..

Pound it home folks because the truth is staring us all in the face. Its time for every democratic party member to denounce this economic path we have set and turn this ship around.