What we are seeing today
is a new iteration of that very old impulse in America: the quest of some of
the propertied (always, it bears noting, a particularly ideologically
extreme-and some would say greedy-subsection of the propertied) to restrict the
promise of democracy for the many, acting in the knowledge that the majority
would choose other policies if it could. (Nancy
MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s
Stealth Plan for America, New York, Random House, 2017).
Less obvious…was the struggle led
by national business leaders…to reshape the ideas, images, and attitudes
through which Americans understood their world, specifically their
understanding of their relationship to the corporation and the state. … The
struggle to undercut organized labor’s and the state’s ideological hold over
the working class and to protect this vision took place within a variety of
contexts (Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and
Liberalism 1945-60, 1995).
The Threat to Democracy
Despite
the recent death of one of the Koch brothers, the idea of market fundamentalism,
unless confronted, will remain a constant feature of American political life. And,
as Nancy MacLean suggests, this idea has institutionalized a fundamental contradiction
between democracy and capitalism.To explain the contradiction, Nancy MacLean analyzes central premises of the so-called Austrian school of economics. Nineteenth and twentieth century luminaries from this tradition, particularly Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, articulated the view that the main priority of any society, but particularly democracies, is to allow markets to flourish unencumbered by government.
According
to this view in a truly free society markets remain supreme. In fact, “liberty”
exists in a society to the extent economic actors can act freely in the
marketplace. Virtually all limitations on economic liberty, market
fundamentalists say, constitute a threat to “real” democracy. Governments exist
only to maintain domestic order (the police power) and to defend the nation
from external aggression (defense of national security): thus providing police
protection and armies. And that should be all. Otherwise, as President
Ronald Reagan expressed the market vision: “Government is not the solution.
Government is the problem.”
As an example, MacLean describes the brutal dictatorship that overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Allende, a socialist, was elected by a plurality in the 1970 presidential election in that country and in the spring, 1973 in municipal elections held across the country, Allende’s coalition of parties drew even more votes for their candidates than did Allende in 1970. The United States, based on directives from President Nixon, had already moved to make the Chilean economy “scream” and had initiated contacts with Chilean generals who would be prepared to carry out a military coup against the popular government. The military coup, ousting Allende from power, was launched, ironically on September 11, 1973.
As an example, MacLean describes the brutal dictatorship that overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Allende, a socialist, was elected by a plurality in the 1970 presidential election in that country and in the spring, 1973 in municipal elections held across the country, Allende’s coalition of parties drew even more votes for their candidates than did Allende in 1970. The United States, based on directives from President Nixon, had already moved to make the Chilean economy “scream” and had initiated contacts with Chilean generals who would be prepared to carry out a military coup against the popular government. The military coup, ousting Allende from power, was launched, ironically on September 11, 1973.
As
MacLean points out, in the aftermath of the coup, General Augusto Pinochet
rounded up and killed thousands of Allende supporters, destroyed the long
tradition of electoral politics, abolished trade unions, and began the process
of ending government involvement in the economy and public institutions. Social
security and education were privatized. Policies of nationalization of key
industries were reversed. All of the shifts to what the Austrian school called
economic liberty were imposed on the Chilean people with the advice of
University of Chicago economists, such as Milton Friedman, and later, George
Mason University economist, James Buchanan, who was instrumental in
recommending “reforms” to the Chilean constitution making return to democracy
more difficult. Subsequently only a few other dictatorships in Latin America
showed any sympathy for the Pinochet regime with most of the world condemning
its domestic brutality. But as MacLean reports, Milton Friedman and his
colleagues never condemned the Chilean regime and Buchanan regarded it as a paradigmatic
case of economic liberty, a model which the world should emulate.
Although the Chilean case represents an extreme example of dictatorship and free market capitalism, she uses it to illustrate a central point. In most societies, and the United States is no exception, majorities of people endorse government policies that can and often do serve the people. As a rule, citizens support public transportation, schools, highways, libraries, retirement guarantees, some publicly provided health care, rules and regulations to protect the environment, guarantees for the right of workers to form unions, as well as police and military protection. The problem for Buchanan and his colleagues is that each one of these government programs, except for the police and military, constrain the “liberty” of entrepreneurs to pursue profit.
To put
it simply, if citizens of the United States were asked if they support public
programs, majorities would say “yes.” Although there have been extraordinary
constraints on majority rule, even enshrined in the US constitution, the
history of the United States can be seen as a history of struggle to improve
and achieve majoritarian democracy. Demands for voting rights for women,
African/Americans, non-propertied and low-income workers and others have been
basic to the American experience. The great anti-colonial struggles of the
twentieth century across the globe were premised on the vision of individual
and collective sovereignty of the people. If economic liberty is conceptualized
as inversely related to majoritarian democracy, then capitalism and democracy
are incompatible.
Nancy MacLean, based on this fundamental contradiction, develops a narrative of efforts by celebrants of economic liberty, the Koch brothers and their allies, to build campaigns in virtually every state and locale to disenfranchise people. ALEC affiliates in state legislatures over the last decade have promoted legislation to suppress the right to vote, eliminate the rights of workers to unionize, disempower city councils, eliminate the right of local governments to make fiscal decisions, and to enshrine in curricula in K to 12 education systems and the universities ideologies about the virtues of economic freedom. There are powerful political pressures to privatize every existing public institution. Again, the best government is no government (except for the maintenance of police force to squelch demands for change and military power to protect the nation at home and abroad). In sum, Nancy MacLean is warning us that there is a powerful drive, based on wealth and power, in the United States to destroy democracy. This democracy, while flawed, has been fought for since the founding of the United States. Its continuation, leaving aside its need for improvement, is under fundamental threat.
“Selling
Free Enterprise”
While
the drive for market fundamentalism has become particularly intense in the twenty-first
century, the fundamental “battle of ideas” that shape the ways in which working
people understand their connections to government, unions, community, and the
economic system go back many years. In two brilliant books, Selling Free
Enterprise (1994) and Waves of Opposition (2006), Fones-Wolf
describes the public sphere, media, education, religious institutions, and
political assemblies as sites for critical debate about the kind of society
that can best serve workers. The histories she presents cover the 1930s through
the 1950s, but the lessons of her history bear upon the ideological struggles perpetuated
by the Koch brothers and their allies today.
In the first book, Selling Free Enterprise, the author describes the open-ended possibilities for political change, it was hoped, which could have been crafted as World War II ended. The war began at a time when workers, through their own mass action, had created the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a militant federation of four million factory workers in electronics, steel, auto, meat packing, mining and smelting, and other industrial and white-collar unions. To help the war effort, CIO unions pledged to avoid strikes in the name of national security. But, when the war ended, workers expected to play a significant role in constructing public policy and shaping the kind of political and economic system that would serve their needs.
Fones-Wolf documents the worldview that guided workers and their unions after the war. They believed in the right of workers to form unions that would represent their interests at the point of production. They believed that government must play a basic role in promoting an improved quality of life for all. They believed that workers derive their freedom and happiness from active participation in communities at the local and national levels. And the character of “free enterprise” was to be circumscribed by the common good. The public good was more important than private property.
The capitalist class, Fones-Wolf argues, had a diametrically opposed view of the political, economic, and even cultural world that needed to be created after the war. Unions represented tyranny, not the interests of workers. Government was a hindrance to human well-being. The more government insinuated itself into the lives of people the worse off they would be. Community, unless it was organized by human relations offices of big corporations, restricted freedom. Individualism, not community, was the bulwark of a free society. And basic to individualism, the capitalists argued, was the “free market,” “free enterprise,” and private property.
Selling Free Enterprise describes the battles over these two fundamentally different worldviews, community versus individualism, in factories, in schools, in churches, in local elections. Such capitalist arms as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce employed factory owners, clergymen, educators and think tanks, the press, radio and television to promote their vision of post-war America using millions of dollars and penetrating every city and town across the United States.
Although the labor movement, peace and justice activists, moderate church people and others challenged the “free enterprise” model of society from 1945 until 1960, they were no match for the money and power of big capital. The free marketeers also utilized the Cold War and the specter of “worldwide communism” to purge those forces that sought to create an egalitarian and communitarian America. While the different ideologies were contested in the 1940s and 1950s, by the early 1960s the capitalist class had achieved ideological hegemony.
Fones-Wolf wrote Waves of Opposition, (University of Illinois Press, 2006) to describe the efforts of labor and progressive groups to have their voices heard on radio, the dominant medium for news and culture from the 1930s until the late 1950s. Corporate elites, CEOs of the major radio networks, and government agents limited the rights of trade unionists to have access to the air waves. Exceptions were noted in the post-war period when AFL and CIO paid programs appeared on national radio and a few union locals were able to buy air- time in their communities to run programs describing the activities of their locals. In a few instances, local labor owned or operated radio stations. One of the longest running efforts was WCFL, out of Chicago. It was a “voice of labor” station operating from the 1920s to the 1970s. But, Fones-Wolf points out, it took major struggles for labor to gain recognition and access to the air waves. With corporate media concentration, the modest foothold labor had in radio, and even less in television, was lost.
The struggles, so graphically described by Fones-Wolf, are being played out today. The age of “neo-liberalism,” ushered in by the Reagan administration and sustained by politicians of both mainstream parties was sold to the American people in ideological terms. A worldview based on individualism, free enterprise, private property, limited government, and the magic of the marketplace was slickly packaged and sold while state/corporate power was used to crush the labor movement. Even the modest “welfare state” model of public/private sector collaboration was challenged by neo-liberal spokespersons.
With increasing media concentration, approximately ten media conglomerates control about fifty percent of all we read, see, and hear, neo-liberalism crushed any alternative visions that stepped in its path. Even when policies are discussed, neo-liberalism reflected in talk radio and rightwing television dominates what and how issues are debated.
Fones-Wolf’s story is about the defeat of workers; Nancy MacLean’s about the threat to democracy. These narratives about the early period of post-war America and the politics of the twenty-first century suggest that struggles for a better future must be fought on the ideological as well as the policy levels. Fundamental concepts such as community versus individualism, government versus free enterprise, and worker rights versus corporate control must be debated. The case should be made that the communitarian, participatory, egalitarian vision of a just society deeply embedded in United States history are constantly challenged by “the propertied” and “national business leaders.” The vision of community once again needs to be brought to union halls, churches, public libraries, schools and universities, and all other social institutions and open spaces where people must decide on their collective future.
In the first book, Selling Free Enterprise, the author describes the open-ended possibilities for political change, it was hoped, which could have been crafted as World War II ended. The war began at a time when workers, through their own mass action, had created the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a militant federation of four million factory workers in electronics, steel, auto, meat packing, mining and smelting, and other industrial and white-collar unions. To help the war effort, CIO unions pledged to avoid strikes in the name of national security. But, when the war ended, workers expected to play a significant role in constructing public policy and shaping the kind of political and economic system that would serve their needs.
Fones-Wolf documents the worldview that guided workers and their unions after the war. They believed in the right of workers to form unions that would represent their interests at the point of production. They believed that government must play a basic role in promoting an improved quality of life for all. They believed that workers derive their freedom and happiness from active participation in communities at the local and national levels. And the character of “free enterprise” was to be circumscribed by the common good. The public good was more important than private property.
The capitalist class, Fones-Wolf argues, had a diametrically opposed view of the political, economic, and even cultural world that needed to be created after the war. Unions represented tyranny, not the interests of workers. Government was a hindrance to human well-being. The more government insinuated itself into the lives of people the worse off they would be. Community, unless it was organized by human relations offices of big corporations, restricted freedom. Individualism, not community, was the bulwark of a free society. And basic to individualism, the capitalists argued, was the “free market,” “free enterprise,” and private property.
Selling Free Enterprise describes the battles over these two fundamentally different worldviews, community versus individualism, in factories, in schools, in churches, in local elections. Such capitalist arms as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce employed factory owners, clergymen, educators and think tanks, the press, radio and television to promote their vision of post-war America using millions of dollars and penetrating every city and town across the United States.
Although the labor movement, peace and justice activists, moderate church people and others challenged the “free enterprise” model of society from 1945 until 1960, they were no match for the money and power of big capital. The free marketeers also utilized the Cold War and the specter of “worldwide communism” to purge those forces that sought to create an egalitarian and communitarian America. While the different ideologies were contested in the 1940s and 1950s, by the early 1960s the capitalist class had achieved ideological hegemony.
Fones-Wolf wrote Waves of Opposition, (University of Illinois Press, 2006) to describe the efforts of labor and progressive groups to have their voices heard on radio, the dominant medium for news and culture from the 1930s until the late 1950s. Corporate elites, CEOs of the major radio networks, and government agents limited the rights of trade unionists to have access to the air waves. Exceptions were noted in the post-war period when AFL and CIO paid programs appeared on national radio and a few union locals were able to buy air- time in their communities to run programs describing the activities of their locals. In a few instances, local labor owned or operated radio stations. One of the longest running efforts was WCFL, out of Chicago. It was a “voice of labor” station operating from the 1920s to the 1970s. But, Fones-Wolf points out, it took major struggles for labor to gain recognition and access to the air waves. With corporate media concentration, the modest foothold labor had in radio, and even less in television, was lost.
The struggles, so graphically described by Fones-Wolf, are being played out today. The age of “neo-liberalism,” ushered in by the Reagan administration and sustained by politicians of both mainstream parties was sold to the American people in ideological terms. A worldview based on individualism, free enterprise, private property, limited government, and the magic of the marketplace was slickly packaged and sold while state/corporate power was used to crush the labor movement. Even the modest “welfare state” model of public/private sector collaboration was challenged by neo-liberal spokespersons.
With increasing media concentration, approximately ten media conglomerates control about fifty percent of all we read, see, and hear, neo-liberalism crushed any alternative visions that stepped in its path. Even when policies are discussed, neo-liberalism reflected in talk radio and rightwing television dominates what and how issues are debated.
Fones-Wolf’s story is about the defeat of workers; Nancy MacLean’s about the threat to democracy. These narratives about the early period of post-war America and the politics of the twenty-first century suggest that struggles for a better future must be fought on the ideological as well as the policy levels. Fundamental concepts such as community versus individualism, government versus free enterprise, and worker rights versus corporate control must be debated. The case should be made that the communitarian, participatory, egalitarian vision of a just society deeply embedded in United States history are constantly challenged by “the propertied” and “national business leaders.” The vision of community once again needs to be brought to union halls, churches, public libraries, schools and universities, and all other social institutions and open spaces where people must decide on their collective future.
