"One Market Under God, and Heaven Help Us All"

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Jul 26 12:26:05 PDT 2000


Carl posted:


>[From the current NY Observer.]
>
>One Market Under God, and Heaven Help Us All
>
>By Nicholas von Hoffman
<snip>
>But Thomas Frank knows, and he ends his book with an eloquent
>paragraph which says that which begs to be said: The so-called New
>Economy has brought about "the destruction of the social contract of
>mid-century, the middle-class republic that our ancestors spent
>decades building. We burnt it up in one great bonfire in order to
>toast a few marshmallows.

Try as I might, in my sympathy for cult stud Thomas Frank, I cannot feel nostalgic for the mid-century "middle-class republic" of Truman & Eisenhower, segregated lunch counters & valium-popping housewives, the Korean War & the CIA coup against Mossadegh, etc. The "social contract of mid-century" did make the "family wage" possible for a significant number of American working men, but the bargain involved swindling women out of war-time gains, putting an end to union organizing in the South, and swearing the loyalty oath to anticommunism at home & abroad. And what's ironic is that the very success of the anticommunist part of the social contract eventually helped to destroy the contract itself. No more Cold War = no necessity to sustain the expensive Welfare State; no more communism & populism abroad = plenty of low-wage labor abroad; successful capitalist showcases like Japan & West Germany (+ East Asian Tigers) = increasing international competition. The Third Way used to mean Swedish-type Social Democracy, the NIEO, etc.; now the Third Way means Clinton, Blair, & Schroeder.

And of course Thomas Frank must know all this -- why then the invocation of the mid-century "middle-class republic"?


>A good education for our kids ascended out of our reach, but our
>position in Cisco paid off

And for what it's worth, educational access has probably improved a great deal for women of all classes & the working class of both sexes and all races since the mid-20th century. Educational content has become more diverse (though class struggles have to stay out of curricula as usual). Educational quality hasn't gotten better, probably, but on average it has not become worse either.

Yoshie



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