Neoliberalism, or: I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.

Here's another post that doesn't have anything to do with writing/publishing -- but it's not exactly political, either. It's based on an email* I got this week about a post Robert Reich published on his Substack that's called "The Tragic History of Neoliberalism". In it, he's refuting comments made by David Brooks, a New York Times columnist who now claims to be a moderate, even though he has, in fact, been a conservative forever.

Reich, whose decades-long career in the federal government includes a stint as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, starts his rebuttal with this chart, which I have unapologetically lifted from his Substack. (He lifted it from the Economic Policy Institute, so I don't feel bad about stealing it. The chart might be easier to read at the EPI link, plus it's interactive there.) 

What it shows is that along about, oh, the late 1970s, the gap between worker productivity and worker compensation began to widen, to the point where, since 1979, worker-bee productivity has increased 86 percent, while worker-bee pay has increased just 27%.

I canceled my NYT subscription quite some time ago, so I haven't actually read the David Brooks column that sparked Reich's post. So I'm going by what Reich has to say about it, which is that what Brooks wrote is an apologetic for neoliberalism. Brooks claims that while wages stagnated in the 1970s and '80s, they began to increase in the early 1990s and, along with productivity, have continued to increase. Brooks says that's the result of neoliberal economic policies, and we should go back to them.

Reich rightfully points out that while wages have trended upward a little bit, the rise in productivity has far outstripped it, and that's due to an imbalance of power caused by those neoliberal economic policies that has basically stolen money from the pockets of the worker bees and put it in the pockets of the fabulously well-to-do.

He doesn't actually use the terms "worker bee" and "fabulously well-to-do", but that's the gist of it.

As I read Reich's post, the refrain of a song kept playing in my head. The song is called "My Back Pages", and I've made that refrain the title of this post. My earworm was the 1967 version by the Byrds: 

I never knew the name of the song until I looked it up this week. I also didn't know that it was written by Bob Dylan, although it made perfect sense when I found that out. Dylan was 23 when he wrote "My Back Pages"; it was his declaration that he was stepping away from writing protest songs because he'd begun to realize that right and wrong, good and evil, weren't as clearly defined as he'd thought they were. He was maturing away from his youthful certainty.

I was interested to see Robert Reich out-and-out say he was questioning neoliberalism, because he was part of the administration that instituted it. Bill Clinton was a Democrat elected in 1992 after 12 years of Republican rule -- first Ronald Reagan, then George H.W. Bush. Clinton ran as an antidote to the GOP's pro-business, anti-worker-bee policies. (In 1981, Reagan fired 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers, leading to the near-collapse of the union movement in America and facilitating that widening gap between wages and productivity in the chart up top.) 

Clinton ran on bringing the New Deal back, to make life easier for American workers. But then -- ah, then -- he continued and expanded the policies begun under Reagan and Bush the Elder that favored free-market capitalism, deregulation, and a reduction in government spending (as long as military spending wasn't cut), and called it neoliberalism.

I enthusiastically voted for Clinton twice. I thought neoliberalism made sense. I believed in capitalism and thought Clinton's success in balancing the federal budget was terrific. I didn't even mind when he instituted "workfare" to force folks on welfare to get a job, thereby cutting -- all together now -- waste, fraud, and abuse.

What I didn't understand was what those policies were doing to my own earnings. I started out in the working world in 1979 -- right about the time when the wage gap really began to widen. 

I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.

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Reich closes out his post by saying, "Neoliberalism should not and cannot be rehabilitated." Going down that road, he says, will just bring us more of the same: suppressed wages, more profit going to the rich, even less help for those who need it, and more and more Trumps.

He's pushing for a progressive populist movement. I'm leery of labeling anything populism, given that far-right populists, aka MAGA, helped to elect Trump. But I agree that we cannot keep going down the road we're on and hope to continue to call ourselves a first-world nation.

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"Fabulously well-to-do" is from Breakfast of Champions, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut that was published in 1973: 

Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold on to it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn’t get their hands on doodley-squat.

Vonnegut, like George Carlin, saw it all coming. I miss them both.

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*Is it just me, or are we all getting inundated with daily long-form emails we feel obliged to read since social media has been throttling organic reach?

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Ironically, I need to lengthen this already lengthy post by updating you on this: My former employer, WilmerHale, won a court case against Trump this past week. To summarize the backstory, Trump has been mad at WilmerHale ever since Bob Mueller, who was a partner at the firm, was appointed as a special counsel to investigate accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. So in March, Trump issued an executive order that was clearly designed to put WilmerHale out of business. It wasn't the only big law firm that Trump targeted in this way, and the management at some firms agreed to settle by providing free legal work to the administration in exchange for having the executive orders against them lifted. But WilmerHale (and two others) chose to fight.

This past week, that strategy paid off. D.C. District Judge Richard Leon blocked Trump's executive order. In a blistering opinion containing 27 exclamation points, Judge Leon agreed with the firm. In part, he said: "I have concluded that this order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional. Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers!"

No word so far on whether Trump will appeal. I suspect he won't; the sturm und drang is what he was after. So this ought to be the end of it.

Kudos to the judge. And congrats to WilmerHale on being on the right side of history once again.

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These moments of bloggy reverse aging have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

All political careers end in failure. His will, too.

Effective immediately, I am hanging up my hat as a prognosticator. Back in August, I predicted that Trump would never be president again. Oh haha. 

I mean, we have a bit of time until January 20; he could still be sent to jail or choke on a hamberder or something, but I'm not counting on it.

Since my comeuppance on Tuesday, I've mostly been laying low on social media. I've been reading comments from my friends, though, and the occasional news story when I have the stomach for it. (When John Dickerson said on CBS Tuesday night, as the returns looked increasingly dismal for Vice President Harris, that he wanted to talk about what an amazing comeback Trump had made -- "amazing comeback", forsooth! -- I turned off the TV and went to bed.) 

I have seen a lot of anguish from our side, of course, and fear about what will happen now. I've also seen some comments along the lines of, "They'll be sorry they elected him!" I've read some uncorroborated stories about that happening already; there was a memorable one by some poster somewhere who said their cousin's sister's uncle (or something) was shocked when the boss said they'd have to forgo their Christmas bonuses this year because the company needed to buy a bunch of manufacturing supplies now, before Trump's Chinese tariffs go into effect. Then the boss explained to them that tariffs don't work the way Trump said they do. There's no way for me to prove any of that, but it sure makes a great story.

There has also been an avalanche of news stories covering the nuts and bolts of how we were all mistaken when we thought the Harris/Walz campaign had it in the bag. Mostly it's been lots of finger pointing. I have been ignoring that junk, mainly because I ran into some revisionist history a while back about the reason some other Democratic candidate for president failed to win (I said it was this; others said no, scholars dug into it years later and discovered it was actually that). I don't remember now which election it was about, but it doesn't matter; my point is that the cause will be found out in due time, and it's likely that whatever the pundits are feverishly saying right now won't be it.

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In counterpoint to these dour postmortems, I ran across this dose of encouragement today.

Andy Borowitz, who wrote a humor column for The New Yorker before they fired him, now publishes his work on Substack. He made today's blog post there free, and in it, he uses history to puncture a bunch of the doom-and-gloom that's been so pervasive on social media this week. I recommend this post to everybody. Pay attention in particular to what he says about Nixon and Reagan, who both won second terms in honest-to-goodness landslides that didn't turn out so well for them. You've heard of Watergate and Iran-Contra, I trust.

Anyway, the title of my post comes from Borowitz's post. It's a paraphrase of a quote by Enoch Powell, a British Conservative politician who died in 1918. Here's the quote in full: 

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.

Here's hoping.

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On Friday, Robert Reich, who was Labor Secretary under President Clinton and who seems to have repudiated Clinton's neoliberalism since then, posted an essay on his Substack that he called "The Lesson". It's a listicle of six of those "what happened" reasons I alluded to above, along with his critique of each one and his assessment of what really did happen (TL;DR: It's the economy, stupid. Biden made great strides in four years, but not enough to break through the right-wing punditry noise).

I want to touch on the third point in his listicle: Republicans won because of misinformation and right-wing propaganda... The answer is for Democrats to cultivate an equivalent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built. He rates this as mostly true. I partly agree. But I disagree with the second sentence, and here I refer you, Gentle Reader, to my post on media bias from a couple of weeks ago. My point then, which I probably should have hammered harder, is that liberals and progressives have already built an equivalent media ecosystem to Fox News and the rest, and a whole lot of us are already siloing ourselves in it: MSNBC, CNN, and so on. Moreover, many are fleeing from sources of factual news like the major newspapers because they're not telling the story the way you want it to be told. 

Folks, that's pretty much the definition of "biased information". Just because you want a thing to be true doesn't make it so. Just because a liberal politician or a left-wing pundit or a political hanger-on tells you a thing, it's not necessarily the truth. We are all supposed to practice discernment -- not just the people on the other side.

Here's something to think about: Maybe you were shocked and surprised that Trump won because you'd siloed yourself from all information to the contrary. 

I am not saying everybody should stop watching Rachel Maddow and switch to Fox and Friends. I'm saying to take a step back. If something seems too good to be true, it's likely not. That's as true for statements from pundits and talk show hosts as it is for emails from Nigerian princes.

This goes for me, too. There were times over the past few months when I read something that pinged my ol' journalistic skepticism. I should have listened to it. But damn, it was comfortable in my silo, surrounded by like-minded friends, y'know?

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One more thing -- this one from Jay Kuo. Not sure where he's getting his numbers (the AP's are different), but when Trump says he won in a landslide (as he inevitably will), at least we know it's not so: 

It won't stop Trump from lying about the election outcome, and it won't matter to his fans. There's only so much we can do.

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Because the algorithm needs an illustration: I went to a wine-and-painting class last night, and this guy was the result. He seems wild-eyed in his spacy universe. Full of hope, maybe? 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

For now, I'm calling him Space Raven. Feel free to suggest a better name.

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These moments of bloggy wishes for a happy juncture have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Resist!
 

Jonesing for a better future.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the last one to know everything.

All these years, I've believed that I was a Baby Boomer. I was born in 1957, which is comfortably inside the traditional span of Boomer birth years -- 1946 to 1964. But I always knew that the world I grew up in was different from the one my brother, who is ten years my senior, grew up in. The kids in his high school graduating class worried about being sent to Vietnam; by the time I was in high school, not only was the Vietnam War over, but the draft was, too. Young people his age went to San Francisco with flowers in their hair (although he never did); all that hippie stuff was over before I was old enough to drive.

But one of the biggest differences was economic. When my brother graduated from college, the economy was booming and there were jobs aplenty. By the time I got out of college, things weren't so rosy. Good-paying jobs were harder to find. I didn't understand at the time what caused the difference. Years later, though, I watched a documentary by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich called Inequality for All that went a long way toward explaining it. You can see a bunch of the graphics from the film at this link. When I watched the movie, the thing that really got my attention was a graphic showing "The Great Prosperity" -- the post-WWII boom years between 1947 and 1977, when the economy was going gangbusters. After that, though -- starting in, oh, 1978 or '79 -- we got stuff like trickle-down economics and Reagan's breaking of the air-traffic controllers' union. Wage growth stalled and financial inequality grew. And grew.

Guess when I graduated from college? 1979.

It turns out there's a label for us late Boomers and early Gen Xers -- those of us who weren't old enough to be part of the Summer of Love and who came of age when regular folks started to get the shaft. For a while, I guess, we were termed the Lost Generation -- cheerful, right? But then in 1999, a researcher named Jonathan Pontell coined the term:

We're the people who grew up jonesing for the better lives we were promised -- the lives our parents and older siblings had.

Although the name has been around since the turn of the millennium, I'd never heard it until a few weeks ago. (I'm the last to know everything, remember?) The label has gained traction in certain circles -- for instance, some folks blamed Jonesers for John Kerry's loss to George W. Bush in 2004. But it's nowhere near universally known. Pontell's book must have sunk into oblivion -- I can't find it anywhere online, even a used copy -- although the author still has a website. 

I guess in a way we're still the Lost Generation.

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By the way, Inequality for All is available to watch for free on YouTube at that link above. And if you're interested in this sort of thing, Reich is going to be presenting a free, on-demand lecture series called "Wealth and Poverty" on his Substack site. The class will run for eleven weeks; the first one will be available this coming Friday. I'm hoping to watch as many of the sessions as I can.

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These moments of bloggy jonesing have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!