Paul Krugman, speaking at the Women’s Democratic Forum of Greater St. Louis at a Thursday luncheon, opined that the long, Alaskan winter of Republican dominance is ending. And Krugman, no Pollyanna, has solid reasons for thinking that “It’s almost over, or at least it can be over.”
Krugman began by explaining how the country has gone awry since the seventies. The once powerful middle class of the fifties and sixties in this country, created by the New Deal, was decimated because many of the programs that enabled more equality than this nation had ever seen before have been dismantled by Movement Conservatives. They have taken us into a second Gilded Age, with the concentration of wealth as great at the top now as it was in the twenties. For example, last year the top 25 hedge fund managers made as much money as the 80,000 New York City teachers make in three years.
Conservatives have wrought this change because they see the Great Society and the New Deal as a violation of American principles. Grover Norquist, when asked once what he wanted to accomplish, said that he intended to take this nation back to the time before Teddy Roosevelt introduced socialism.
The reason Republicans were able to take us out of an age of equality and into another gilded age, according to Krugman, was that they gained a grip on power by appealing to racism. The Civil Rights Act was the signal for many Southern white males to switch parties. By the time Reagan was running for president, Republicans had learned to use race. Reagan went to Mississippi, during his first presidential campaign, and spoke there–at the urging of Roger Ailes, currently the president of Fox News–in favor of “states’ rights”, code for racism. He popularized the notion of the “welfare queen”, even though the woman he described never existed. She was a product of his fertile imagination. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, relied on Willie Horton to get himself elected.
As the Republicans gained power, their goal was to weaken labor. Union membership declined from 30 percent of the workers in the sixties to 12 percent now. Canada, on the other hand, still has about a 30 percent union membership workforce. Why the difference in the two countries? The Reagan years saw open warfare on unions, and it is no accident that Wal-Mart, with its focus on keeping unions out, began its climb to power during those years.
Now, however, the Republican hold on America is losing its grip. Racism is less powerful. Look at what happened to George Allen last year, in Virginia no less, for using a racial epithet, “macaca”. His racist comment put Jim Webb into Allen’s senate seat.
The other critical factor in loosening Republican power is a surge of progressive economic populism. Americans see what is happening to their jobs and their health insurance under Republican rule. Last year Democracy Corps did a poll which revealed that 70 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Respondents in the poll were asked to choose from various phrases that described the possible reasons they thought so. The most commonly chosen phrases were “Big business gets everything it wants” and “leaders have forgotten the middle class.” Americans are angrier than those pollsters have ever seen them.
The place to begin progressive reform, Krugman believes, is with health care. We spend 60 percent more on health care than France, for example, and yet the French get better health outcomes than we do. Now, however, there is a strong progressive coalition behind health care reform, and all three major Democratic presidential candidates have introduced health plans that could eventually turn into Medicare for All. (Krugman’s only caveat was that he fears interest groups might be able to buy their way out of real health care reform.)
Less than three years ago, it looked as if we might lose social security, but the left fought back and we didn’t. Now, we may get health care reform by 2009. The times they are a-changin’, and Paul Krugman believes they’re likely to be better.
what did Krugman mean by the statement that he fears interest groups migh be able to buy their way out of real reform.
Also your statement regarding SS “it looked as if we might lose SS” might be reframed to read “we almost threw SS away at George’s urging”, b/c the argument about SS is all Repub talking points, fearmongering and misinformation. The SS system is solid. Consider for a moment, if everyone paid FICA on all of their income like we do, (and they can!) the SS system would be rolling in riches. It is just being used as a political foil right now.
A wonderful article. Thanks for you diligence
I hate to disagree with Krugman about the Dem candidate’s healthcare proposals & hope after obtaining & reading his book that his analysis is closer to mine. But incremental healthcare reform proposals have been debated for some sixty years since Humphrey proposed a comprehensive national Medicare for All plan during the Truman administration that was blocked by conservatives. All later plans have been weakened while trying to build more support, then either killed or subverted by the medical-industrial complex so that they keep both control and a large portion of the expenditures. Corporations are never going to willingly give up the funds, now approaching ~$Billion/yr, that they keep in premiums or sales that goes to their profits, marketing, misleading advertising and PR campaigns, lobbying,etc. This is why directly converting to a single-tier public system that prohibits private insurance “competition” is probably the only way to switch to a healthcare system that puts patient care ahead of profits. That is how Canadian Medicare works and how the plan currently proposed by Cong. Conyers & promoted by Cong. Kucinich would work. Only then would the government be strong enough, sort of forced to be smart enough, to control drug markups or hospital overhead. Thus costs and so an annual healthcare budget can be determined. Smaller changes can’t stop the ever growing corporate greed and won’t end multi-tiered plans with varying degrees of coverage based on how much is paid.