America Today: in Mythology and Fact

America has been engaged in a deeply rooted cultural-political Cold War that has been more or less simmering for decades. But it has been brought to the surface in a way that has come to effectively dominate the current political campaigns by the confluence of two additional factors. These are what I call, 1) the closing of the international frontier, and 2) the consequent squeeze on the capacity of neo-Liberal political economy to continue to provide for even a modicum of economic growth for middle America. For the purposes of this post, I will be far too brief. But let me outline the structure of this argument, to which I have already referred in some prior posts.

1) Stage One, brilliantly developed by Colin Woodard in his “American Nations”, concerns the ethno-national regional structure of America’s pattern of settlement. That has created in effect two fairly distinct moral-political coalitions whose values and world views are almost polar opposites. They can not even agree on a set of common facts, or impartial criteria to evaluate arguments. And with the proliferation of modern media outlets, it is as if each coalition lives in its own self-contained world. This ethno-national and regional polarization has even been augmented by what social scientists refer to as the “big sort,” as people tend to relocate to areas inhabited by like-minded residents.

To vastly over simplify, drawing directly on Woodard’s analysis, we have the Deep South led coalition that basically includes Appalachia and the Far West, confronting New England, New York, and the West Coast, fighting over their ability to gain the support of the Hispanics, expanding from the Southwest, and the people of what one might refer to as the Midwest. (The development and migration patterns of African-American communities — as well as of Hispanic communities — has, of course, greatly complicated this simplified picture.) It is important to realize that these opposed coalitions tend to have quite opposed conceptions of the nature of government, the community, the individual, business, the market, religion, the family, the role of women, and of course, race. Clearly, each of these issues could be the basis of a volume on its own. But enuf said of this for the present.
2) These conflicting moral, political, religious, and racial orientations are increasingly impacted by, and having to come to terms with, what I am calling the closing of the international frontier of American expansion. As I have developed this point in my chapter on “The American Enterprise,” Chapter 8 of my “Critique of Western Philosophy and Social Theory,” growth has been the mantra of American development. First across the great North American continent. And when that expanding frontier closed in the late 19th Century, the United States started building its international empire. Throughout the middle of the 20th Century it more or less could set the terms of its economic and military hegemony.

That capacity for relatively unconstrained economic growth, which fueled the significant enhancement of the material quality of life of most Americans, even if far from equitably, has increasingly had to confront growing limitations coming from: the Cold War, the emergence of the Third World, the development of economic counterweights first from Japan, then from China, India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, South America, and the European Union. And, more subtly, and pervasively, having so reluctantly to deal with the increasing constraints on previously more or less unconstrained economic growth which is the meaning of the ecological crises. All of these have increasingly squeezed the economic capacity of the United States to more or less grow at will, and use that growth to “buy off” the support of the American people.
3) This leads to final dimension of this triangular confrontation; the challenge of, and to, American “free enterprise”, neo-Liberal capitalism. Here, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s brilliant book, “Winner-Take-All Politics,” nails the political offensive of the ruling capitalist elites beginning in the 1970s to the squeeze placed on their capacity for relatively unconstrained economic growth. (Though the authors focus is primarily on what they see as a corporate counter-offensive to the politics of the Great Society and the counter cultural movements of the 60s, I think we need to place all of that within the wider historical context suggested by my previous remarks.) Two examples of that historical squeeze, for example, that the authors do not mention is the oil embargoes and consequent gas lines of the early 70s, plus the action of Richard Nixon to end the dollar’s convertibility with gold that took place in 1971.

But the point is well documented by the authors as to the institution of a sophisticated political offensive, mobilizing the corporate community. Initially working primarily through the Republican Party, and increasingly co-opting the Democratic Party, the corporate world has been able to create a public consensus against government and in support of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for “the job creators,” on behalf of the “Free Market” and “Free Trade,” and thus they have been able to re-write the rules of the political and economic game in such a way as to vastly expand their power and wealth, at the expanse of the vast majority of Americans. Thus they have been able to garner the vast majority of whatever benefits from the narrowing space for US economic growth remains possible, while squeezing middle America. And that squeeze is hurting more and more. And more and more people are no longer trusting the elites that have been selling them their neo-Liberal snake oil — however confused most Americans are about what has been happening to them, and who and what are to blame.
But one thing is certain. Americans have not yet even begun to have a public conversation about these fundamental changes in our historical situation, and what we can and should do about it. We continue to act as if it’s politics (and economics) as usual. And that cannot last. But this political campaign is the first in which this squeeze has begun to fundamentally challenge the control of the Neo-Liberal elite.