Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., wrote a piece the other day asking, “What happened to the left?”
Why, he wonders, has there been no movement counter to the Tea Party; no effort “to organize a serious movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession.”
Kazin answers his own question by reviewing the forces that came together in the first half of the 1900s and rode the Great Depression into a big government era that resulted in a massive redistribution of wealth from the very rich to the working classes.
The movement was so successful that it lost its reason for being. Unemployment dropped, home ownership flourished, the unions gained great power, which they used to see that wages and benefits for union workers rose steadily.
The old Populist rhetoric no longer fit the facts. Workers were not being exploited. They had, in fact, become the exploiters of their own successes.
That’s what happened to the left. It won its battles and retired from the field.
Today, it is easier to explain why there is so much energy on the right than it is to understand why no counter passion has been aroused in its opponents. For the same old foes of America’s working class and the retired middle class have sprung back to life and are wreaking devastation all around.
The scene prompted Kazin to say “Barack Obama’s tenure is starting to look less like the second coming of F.D.R. and more like a re-run of Jimmy Carter.”
There will be no second coming of Roosevelt — or of John L. Lewis, or Walter Reuther, or Henry Wallace. History doesn’t work like that. Each era produces its own leaders and its own pied pipers.
But Kazin’s question will provoke a sigh from political junkies of a certain age.
In today’s America the distribution of wealth is more unequal than at anytime since the 1920s. And the rich will keep getting richer while income stagnates or declines for the rest of the population so long as the current tax structure remains unchanged. But if there is an elected official in Kansas who is decrying this inequality and promising to do something to make things better, his or her voice is not reaching Iola.
To the contrary, both of the U.S. senators from Kansas say they can’t even support giving aid to the victims of the Joplin tornado or those left gravely damaged by the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Irene — the most basic of charities — unless the spending is offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget. Unbelievable.
THE GOVERNMENT left to the American people after the Great Depression and World War II was a government that was judged by its citizens by how well it met their needs. It was a government that created universal retirement pensions, gave college educations to its military veterans through the GI Bill of Rights, connected the states to each other with the Interstate Highway System, helped Europe recover from the war through the Marshall Plan, made home ownership possible for almost every American family, took care of the medical needs of its elderly — the list of ways government responded, and still responds, to its people’s needs is too long to list.
Prof. Kazin would say, I think, that ultra-conservatives have hijacked Washington. That the left is nowhere to be seen. That government will now be judged by how much it can shrink itself rather than what it can do for the citizenry — and that that state of affairs is abominable, will not long be tolerated and should be reversed.
And to that judgment, I say amen.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
