In 2012, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts over the last half century in preventing another Continental war. But four generations later, with fascism once again on the march in Europe, it’s becoming increasingly evident that the Nobel Prize committee spoke too soon.
It’s looking more and more like 1936 all over again.
Only this time, in America, we don’t have an FDR with a solid majority in Congress. And just like after the crash of 1857 and subsequent Civil War, the Economic Royalists find themselves in power once again.
The Economic Royalists have gained majorities in Congress and state legislatures all around the nation, crippling millions of people with brutal austerity cuts to social services, with union busting, and with privatization of the commons.
As the cycle predicts, extremism is on the rise in America. In 2008, there were just 149 militia groups nationwide. By the end of 2012, there were more than 1,200.
And thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, there’s more money in our political system than ever before, and crony capitalism rivals that of the 1920s.
And unique to this cycle are the even more daunting challenges we confront in a rapidly warming planet.
The legendary Bill Moyers bluntly told me back in 2011, “Our democracy is dysfunctional.”
He was right then, and it’s only gotten worse.
“We no longer have a government of, by, and for the people—representative democracy. We have government by plutocracy—the rule of the rich for the rich by the rich,” Moyers said on my television program. “Plutocracy has one purpose, which is to protect wealth.”
The hallmark of plutocracy is monopoly. Fewer and fewer companies owning more and more wealth. Competition is destroyed by unrestrained growth of corporate interests. Big companies buy small companies over and over again, until there are no small businesses left. Private-equity firms take care of the rest, even harvesting small- and medium-sized businesses for a profit.
You could parachute from some great altitude over any part of America, into any American city, and you’d have no idea where you are. The great homogenization has happened; all the cities look the same. There are virtually no unique, regional, family-owned small businesses left; just transnational behemoths whose brands populate every mall, downtown, and suburb of this country.
New Royalists such as the Kochs, the Waltons, and the Adelsons have replaced the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Du Ponts, and Morgans of the past.
Bill Moyers, sounding like President Grover Cleveland, noted, “Democracy is in trouble. Democracy in America has been a series of narrow escapes. We may be running out of luck—representative government is threatened at this moment by wealth, power, and corporate conglomerate interests.”
A year later, Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman explained to me, “We are living through a time where we face an enormous economic challenge.”
He warned, “There are a lot of ugly forces being unleashed in our societies on both sides of the Atlantic… We may look back at this, thirty years from now, and say, ‘That is when it all fell apart.’ And by ‘all,’ I don’t just mean the economy.”
Morris Berman, in his Twilight of American Culture,28 suggests we must create a new monastic class to preserve classical wisdom and teachings as we enter a repeat of the feudal Dark Ages. This coming period of chaos and darkness, Berman suggests, could easily last a century or more before the next Renaissance lifts again the wisdom of Plato and Shakespeare into the light.
It’s remotely possible that things won’t get that bad. But that will depend on “We the People” overcoming the new Economic Royalists, who’ve taken advantage of this next Great Forgetting and are dragging the nation toward the Crash of 2016.
But the greatest probability is that the Obama administration will do the same thing the Bush administration did when confronted with the forces of the oncoming Great Crash in 2007–08. It will tinker around the edges, inflate as many bubbles as possible, and try desperately to hold things off until the November 2016 elections are safely in the bag. If it doesn’t all come apart before then, that will be the time of maximum vulnerability.
CHAPTER 2
A Corporate Call to Arms
A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.
The 1960s came roughly thirty years after Franklin D. Roosevelt first declared war on the Economic Royalists. A war he won by changing the basic American compact from one of “let the rich do what they want, and the working people are on their own” to one where if you worked hard and kept your nose clean, then you could have that “American Dream,” even if it meant the rich had to cough up a little more to “spread the wealth.”
In those first five decades after the crash, America became a place where you were protected from old age and disability with Social Security, protected from joblessness with unemployment insurance, and honored with a living wage thanks to strong new protections for labor unions.
Productivity rose at a steady rate—and in lockstep along with it, working people’s wages rose. Average working Americans were getting richer and richer, comparatively speaking. A third of the nation’s workforce was unionized, and because union jobs set the wage floor in much of America, well over two-thirds of the workforce had all the benefits of a union job. Working-class people bought homes and cars, had affordable health care, and took vacations. By the 1960s, a solid middle class had emerged.
The Royalists were horrified. The conservative intellectual base, such as Russell Kirk and W. F. Buckley, genuinely feared that if a middle class grew large enough—and politically and economically powerful enough—it would inevitably lead to social chaos.
Average and largely unsophisticated factory-working people—and particularly their teenage children—now had more time and money on their hands. And, the Royalists knew, idle hands—with free college, growing civil and social rights, and economic safety—could jeopardize their excessive profits.
The Royalists of the 1950s and early 1960s predicted there would be even louder calls for even more rights. They saw themselves losing control of our nation’s politics and, thus, our nation’s economic future.
But the Economic Royalists also knew that the vigilant spirit FDR had instilled in the nation against the forces of plutocracy was waning by the end of the 1960s. Those who were just coming into power with FDR during the last Great Crash in 1929 were, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, retiring and dying off, being replaced with a new generation with little direct memory of why the crash had happened, how it had worsened for three long years, and, most important, who’d caused it. And that generation would be teaching the next generation, which had no memory whatsoever of what caused the Great Crash and the war that followed it.