Splitting the Difference

I RECALL A TIME WHEN the two major political parties were somewhat like "tweedle dee twedle dum", scarcely distinguishable versions of each other. This was in the post World War Two era, the nineteen fifties, sixties, and seventies. During the nineteen thirties the difference was indeed great: the Republican party of business as usual, the status, quo, the free market of Herbert Hoover, versus the new dealing Roosevelt Demmocrats. There's nothing like winning a world war or two to inspire national unity of purpose, nothing like national economic prosperity to inspire national popular contentment, nothing like external enemies to engender unity of purpose for pureply defensive purposes, with a little imperialism thrown into the mix. The Soviet Union filled the bill nicely. The period between 1945 and 1970 was, according to concensus economic history and historical thought, the most prosperous era in American history. A minimum wage income could feed a family of four. Because of sharply progressive income tax laws, there were relatively few wealthy people, and relatively few poor people, if you don't include the black underclass, which, in those days, didn't count. Then came Reagan, and the great national consensus began to unravel, and the great unraveling, in the great big ball of yarn that is America, continues to this day, but surely, is nearly complete. According to some it will culminate in civil war. Its happened before. Stranger things have happend, as we like to say. Under Reagen, neo-liberal economics, the philosophy that the less government involvement in and regulation of the economy, the better, was insinuated into national policy, and American culture began its great divide, between the very wealthy, and the very poor, the middle class shrinking, as it continues to do today. Corporations noticed the great national prosperity of the post World War Two era, decided that they, the ownership class, was not getting its fair share of the credit or pie, and thus began the era of corporate "share holder dividend maximization". Jack Welch, CEO of GE from 1981 to 2001, deserves credit for this "innovation". His rise to power coincided with Reagan, the rise of corporate power, and the death of the American middle class, internal harmony, and national unity. As the twentieth century ebbed, gone were the days when labor and managment worked hand in hand for their mutual prosperity, when folks worked for the same company their entire working lives, and retired with a healthy pension. Retirenement pensions were replaced with worker financed 401Ks, labor unions and wages became the enemmies of economic growth, and since 1980 both have been suppressed mightily, aided and ebetted by big corporate government, paid for by our corporate masters, as Gore Vidal called them. The Democrat party became the party of minorities and the poor, the Republicans the party of the corporate wealthy and such as remained of the middle class. The magic formula of Trump was in his ability to lure white working class men away from their true natural party, the Democrats. This he accomplished by posing immigrants, government, and corporations all as the enemy, a multi billionaire, or rather a self proclaimed alleged multi billionaire, suddenly the champion of the working man. Its a sham, we now know, we always should have known or did know, based on white Christian anger at an ethnically diversifying, secularizing culture, changing, and changing forever. The bottom line, to use that horrible cliche, is: if you're poor, working class, or middle class, you have nothing to gain from voting Republican, and everything to gain from voting Democratic.