If We Can Keep It - Chapters 5 and 6

 If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might be Saved, by Michael Tomasky is a book about the history of our government, its polarization, and how we've come to our current state of fracture between our two major parties. If you haven't read my posts on Chapters 1 - 4, I would recommend checking those out for added context, but you won't have any trouble keeping up with this chapter without that background. Chapters five and six discuss how the US public and government changed over the last thirty - forty years, widening the rift between parties and people.

Chapter five focuses on the public. According to Tomasky, people in the United States once saw themselves as citizens rather than consumers. Consumption of goods in the way that currently drives most of our lives is a fairly new phenomenon. Tomasky describes the the time between 1968 and 1980 as a period of collapse. High inflation plagued the country during these years, and trust in the government and its institutions was low. During this breakdown, people pulled away from civic engagement and leaned into more individualized concerns. In contrast to the Great Depression, when people came together due to economic strife, in the 70's people split apart to deal with their misfortunes individually. Reagan encouraged this approach and a new focus emerged for the people on status and class differentiation.

As inflation wreaked havoc on the economy, credit cards gained popularity as a way that Americans could start spending again. Credit card balances across the country in 1970 were very low, nearly zero. But by 1980 that balance had gone up to 80 billion, 240 billion in 1990, and 700 billion in 2000. I found that in 2024, credit card balances across the country topped 1 trillion. Credit cards were somewhat of an escape from economic hardship in the 70s, but in the 80's they brought out a new culture of spending which has grown dramatically in the last 40 years. This plays into the shift of American identity from being citizens to being consumers.

The 80's were defined by greed and acceptance of greed. A popular idea began to spread that greed is actually a good thing. In 1987 Gordon Gekko published in Wall Street: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit." Apparently, this quote is often accompanied by the idea that people became more materialistic through no outward forces, just on our own as if it were human nature. But that wasn't the case at all. It was orchestrated via declining unions, banking deregulation to the benefit of "trickle-down" economics, and a boom on Wall Street. 

Reagan fired 12,000 federal workers who were striking (because they were unionized) as air-traffic controllers. It gave the private sector a distinct message: it was okay to hire replacement workers and to stop negotiating with unions. Union membership declined immediately and drastically. Then, Reagan rolled back a New Deal provision which had for decades prevented corporations from buying back their own stocks. This led to profit hoarding and disinvestment rather than trickling down to the rest of the economy as was promised. Americans watched the wealthy get wealthier. From 1985 - 2012, bonuses paid to Wall Street employees increased by 409% when adjusted for inflation, and that's including a small dip due to the housing bubble in 2008. CEOs took the cue and increased their own pay by almost 1000% (that's 11 times higher) from 1978 - 2013 including inflation adjustments, while wages barely grew at all. And at the same time, the tax burden was shifted from the wealthy to the middle class via tax cuts for the rich.

At the same time, society was finding a renewed focus on status and class differentiation. Rather than being angry with the wealth-hoarders, many Americans admired and envied them. Those who could afford to, began buying luxury items and using them as status symbols. The market was flooded with "high-end" goods which were largely comparable to their cheaper competitors. Sure there were distinctions, but they weren't really necessary distinctions so much as they were distinctions of one's status. Americans were no longer being asked to make sacrifices in the face of economic hardship, but to simply spend differently. And we did. Our entire lives began to revolve around the consumption of goods, and the display of class status. This is how Tomasky asserts we made the metamorphosis from citizens to consumers. 

Chapter six discusses the metamorphosis of government that transpired parallel to that of American culture. The phrase "culture wars" was popularized in the 1990's as a response to students at Stanford in '88 protesting a Western Civilization class which they said focused too much on dead white males while ignoring the works of women and people of color. Culture wars seeped into politics, initially creating tension between liberals, who felt making room for other authors didn't necessarily mean doing away with the dead white males students were protesting, and the radicals, who didn't trust the middle ground liberals pushed for. This is a dynamic we still see with many issues today; the split between liberals and radicals in the Democratic party has only widened. Republicans have seen a similar split in their party with the rise of Trumpism which tends to exploit culture war issues as well.

Money, you might be surprised to find, hasn't shaped politics for all of American history. Politicians have often throughout our history enjoyed a level of privilege, but it wasn't until a Supreme Court decision in the mid-70's that political donations really took off. In Buckley v Valeo, the Supreme Court determined that money is speech in the sense that people deserve the freedom to support any politician or issue they like in the form of financial donations, and those donations are protected under the First Amendment freedom of speech. Candidates could also self-finance, which led to parties only encouraging wealthy people to run for office. It was around the same time that corporate lobbying took off, and focus groups expanded from being a marketing tool to a political tool, so all of these factors played together at once to create the issue we face today of big-money in politics.

This shift, combined with the media boom Republicans experienced after the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine, brought forth a more welcoming environment for extremism. The Fairness Doctrine was passed in 1947 and it required any company with a broadcasting license to present both sides of any issue of public importance. The argument was that if both sides weren't presented, Americans could be duped into believing one side without knowledge of the other. Interesting, right? The argument which prevailed to have it repealed was essentially that both liberal and conservative stations existed. Why should a conservative station have to present the liberal argument, when the liberal argument is already being presented on other stations. It wasn't discussed much that liberal stations also presented the conservative perspective. When it was abolished in 1987, there was a spike in radio coverage of public affairs and almost all of the new stations were presenting only the conservative perspective. The Fairness Doctrine existed on the books for decades after it was abolished by the FCC, rarely if ever enforced, before it was formally revoked in 2011. Many mainstream media companies still try to adhere to the ethical stance of presenting both sides, but without the legal binding of the doctrine, many media companies have become extremist echo chambers for their viewers and listeners. 

All of these factors coalesced together to shift American politics. Over the last 30 years, according to research scoring congressional votes by Keith Poole, Nolan McCarty, and Howard Rosenthal, the Democratic party has shifted to the left by 33%. Seems like a significant change, right? Well, the Republican party has shifted to the right by 150%. So while Democrats try to cater to moderate Republicans, they're catering to a rightward shift in American politics as a whole. This book was written in 2019. How do you think American politics has shifted in the last 6 years?

Chapter 7 is the one I've been waiting for, and I'm excited to read and comment on it here. It will lay out Tomasky's 14-point plan to save our Republic. The book is due back at the library on Sunday the 26th, so my summary and commentary will be published before then.