The American Dream Has Collapsed (Almost)

A Fifty-three Year Campaign

“What we are watching is the final stage of the 40-year neoliberal transition of our nation from a forward-looking and still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs.
...
And now, for a second time in American history, we’re confronted with a near-complete takeover of about half of our nation by America’s oligarchs."^[1]

It started with a 34-page memo by Lewis F. Powell Jr. to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in August 1971.^[2]

Two months later, President Nixon nominated Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class, Hartmann, Thom

The Powell Memorandum ultimately came to be a blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as the Business Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and inspired the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active. CUNY professor David Harvey traces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo. Historian Gary Gerstle refers to the memo as "a neoliberal call to arms." Political scientist Aaron Good describes it as an "inverted totalitarian manifesto" designed to identify threats to the established economic order following the democratic upsurge of the 1960s.

Powell argued, "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as the chief antagonist of American business. Powell urged conservatives to undertake a sustained media-outreach program, including funding neoliberal scholars, publishing books, papers, popular magazines, and scholarly journals, and influencing public opinion.

This memo foreshadowed a number of Powell's court opinions, especially First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which shifted the direction of First Amendment law by declaring that corporate financial influence of elections by independent expenditures should be protected with the same vigor as individual political speech. Much of the future Court opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission relied on the same arguments raised in Bellotti.^[3]

"By 1980, the middle class encompassed as much as 55 to 60% of us, depending on whose numbers you’re using. Today it is well down in the 40s."^{[4] [5]} "From 1971 to 2023, the share of Americans who live in lower-income households increased from 27% to 30%, and the share in upper-income households increased from 11% to 19%. . . . But the middle class has fallen behind on two key counts. The growth in income for the middle class since 1970 has not kept pace with the growth in income for the upper-income tier. And the share of total U.S. household income held by the middle class has plunged."^{[6] [7]}

Reagan and his conservative buddies intentionally gutted the American middle class, but they did so not just out of greed but also with what they thought was a good and noble justification.
. . .
The American middle-class at that time was growing more rapidly than any middle-class had ever grown in the history of the world, in terms of the number of people in the middle class, the income of those people, and the overall wealth that those people were accumulating. The middle-class was growing in wealth and income back then, in fact, faster (https://www.growthemiddleclass.com/get-the-facts) than was the top 1%.
. . .
While it looks from the outside like the singular mission of the Reagan Revolution was simply to help rich people and giant corporations get richer and bigger, the ideologues driving the movement actually believed they were helping to restore safety and stability to the United States, both politically and economically.^[8]

It wasn't just tax cuts for the rich and political control of government.

In 1981, a young lawyer, fresh out of Harvard law school, joined the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice, taking up a cause that had been fomenting in Republican circles for over a decade by that point. From his perch inside the Reagan DOJ, this lawyer would attempt to bring down one of the defining pieces of 20th century legislation—the Voting Rights Act. His name was John Roberts.

Over thirty years later in 2013, these efforts by John Roberts and the conservative legal establishment culminated when Roberts, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote Shelby County vs. Holder, one of the most consequential decisions of modern jurisprudence. A dramatic move that gutted the Voting Rights Act, Roberts’s decision—dangerously premised on the flawed notion that racism was a thing of the past—emboldened right-wing, antidemocratic voting laws around the country immediately. No modern court decision has done more to hand elections to Republicans than Shelby.^[9]

The results of the Powell / Reagan Revolution: shrinking middle class and growing inequality.^{[10] [11]}

Chart: Growth in U.S. Real Wages, by Income Group (1979-2023)

Growing inequality is not just in the U.S. But eight out of the ten richest people in the world live in the United States.^[12] "Since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer. Hardship and hunger are a daily reality for many people worldwide. At current rates, it will take 230 years to end poverty, but we could have our first trillionaire in 10 years.

A huge concentration of global corporate and monopoly power is exacerbating inequality economy-wide. Seven out of ten of the world’s biggest corporations have either a billionaire CEO or a billionaire as their principal shareholder. Through squeezing workers, dodging taxes, privatizing the state and spurring climate breakdown, corporations are driving inequality and acting in the service of delivering ever-greater wealth to their rich owners."^{[13] [14]}

Thom Hartmann asks, "Is the 'Reagan Revolution's' Attack on America's Middle Class at an End?" (ibid. ^[8])

Maybe.

President Biden said: “We need to remember the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us. All of us. We, the people.“

This was an all-out declaration of war on the underlying premise of the Reagan Revolution. And a full-throated embrace of the first three words of the Constitution, “We, the People.”

And now Vice President Harris and Governor Walz have carried on Biden’s turn away from Reagan’s and Clinton’s neoliberalism and similarly embraced FDR’s Keynesian Economics that built the American middle class.
. . .
Americans are now watching, for the third time in just 30 years, a Democratic president clean up the economic and social debris of a prior Republican presidency. They’re starting to figure out that crushing the middle-class didn’t produce prosperity and stability, but instead destroyed tens of millions of people’s lives and dreams.

And they’re seeing the hollowness of the Republican’s promises as we all watch, aghast, as the Trump/Vance campaign scrambles to mobilize the last remnants of its billionaire and white racist base, at the same time waging an all-out war on the ability of Black, young, and working-class people to vote.

President Biden’s speech was the beginning of the end for the Republicans, although it appears only a few of them realize it. And he doubled down on it in his brilliant presentation at the DNC last night, saying of Reagan’s neoliberal experiment, “Even a lot of Democrats thought it would work, but it didn’t.”

This truly is a new day in America.

As they roll out new economic policies this week, Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz are driving a stake through the heart of the GOP’s 44-year war against the middle class.

Let’s hope the damage Republicans have done over the last four decades isn’t so severe that America can’t be brought back from the brink of chaos and desperation. (ibid.^[8])

Trump’s MAGA supporters are understandably hurting and wanting change, but their support is misplaced. “Trump is no longer even pretending to champion the working class.”[15]

It's a choice in November.

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Endnotes

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1. Are Our Oligarchs Going to Drag Us Into Civil War? | The New Republic

2. Powell-Memo.pdf download - Reuters

3. Lewis F. Powell Jr. - Wikipedia

4. Inside the tax cut that changed everything for the middle class in America - Raw Story

5. The Tipping Point: Most Americans No Longer Are Middle Class : The Two-Way : NPR

6. The American Middle Class - Key Facts, Data and Trends Since 1970 | Pew Research Center

7. pewresearch.org/RE_2024.05.31_American-Middle-Class_FINAL.pdf

8. Is the "Reagan Revolution's" Attack on America's Middle Class at an End?

9. Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections: Daley, David

10. Chart: Growth in U.S. Real Wages, by Income Group (1979-2023)

11. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else: Freeland, Chrystia

12. Forbes Real Time Billionaires List - The World's Richest People

13. Inequality Inc. | Oxfam

14. Download Inequality PDF - webassets.oxfamamerica.org/media/documents/Inequality_Inc._k6NfmGq.pdf

15. [Trump is no longer even pretending to champion the working class](https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2024/08/18/opinion-trump-is-no-longer-even/)