I’m old enough to remember an America that wasn’t too far from the 1960s. One of my childhood best friends had a mother who was a “hippy” in a classic sense, dressing like a “flower-child” deep into the 1980s. Basically, her sartorial sense was frozen in the second half of the 1960s, when she was at university. She was no longer with my friend’s father, who suffered from post-traumatic stress due to his experiences in Vietnam.* The late 1960s and early 1970s really had a huge impact on my friend’s life.
The people who went through the 1960s as young adults, the Baby Boomers, experienced something that transformed our culture. 1964 was closer to 1944 in many ways than it was to 1968. In Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson the author argues that one of the reasons that the sociopathic cult leader was able to flourish in Southern California during this period is that people had no expectations of a future anything like the past. People expected literally anything to happen. No matter how crazy.
Since the late 1960s, we really haven’t seen anything similar in terms of cultural tumult. The period between 2015 and 2020, for example, isn’t that shattering. On the other hand, I wonder if in some ways 2015 will be seen as a watershed. That was certainly the year many of us started to be worried and confused about what was going on in this country.
But the reason I’m posting this is to ask older readers who remember the 1960s: does this feel similar in any way? Clearly there is a contrast, in that the late 1960s was filled with hope, and the early 2020s not so much.
* Strange note, many years later when I lived in Berkeley, California, at the other end of the country, I ran into my childhood friend’s half-brother, who was a computer science graduate student at Cal. He had a very distinctive last name, when he told me where he had grown up I realized who he was.
I guess I am in the demographic you want. In 1965, the world did not look that much different to me than it looked in 1964. The real watershed was 1968. The events of that year were overwhelming.
Lyndon Johnson who had won in a landslide in 1964, was forced out of a reelection campaign. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Urban race riots followed the King assassination. The Vietnam War got really hot with the Tet Offensive. (US combat deaths in 1968 were ~16,600 out of ~58,000 total for the whole war) Anti-war demonstrations led to riots at the Chicago Democrat convention. In Europe the French Government was overwhelmed by student riots combined with labor union strikes. The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring movement. In China the Cultural Revolution reached a crescendo. LSD and marijuana became ubiquitous.
Nothing that has happened in the last decade comes anywhere near the drama and violence of those events.
I think there is no linearity in this respect. Just look at what happened in the last days, what lurks around tge corner and what could, in theory, become out of it:
– Corona global pandemic with millions of dead (death rate of about 2 percent)
– a new financial, this time ssystemic crisis with a “blackout” resulting in a major recession
– the escalation of the Syrian-Iranian conflict with Russia, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the USA involved – who knows where this ends…
– major Islamist attack with a “dirty bomb” in a major Western city
– refugee crisis in Europe escalating completely with systemic and political shocks following
Etc.
All of this might not happen now, or in two years or never. And any of that could change A LOT.
Other debates would be almost meaningless and unimportant in the face of something like that.
The year of 1968 had a lot of influences, but by far, by a margin, the duration, character and intensity of the Vietnam War was No. 1.
Cultural Marxism might have slowly crept into people’s heads otherwise, but this factor alone made the rapid infection possible.
Because the conservative and patriotic values became vulnerable and discredited by the war situation.
And the Cultural Marxists like Marcuse had the recipe for exactly that kind of situational propaganda. They were THE anti-war and anti-occidental propagandists.
And students which would have been indecisive otherwise, but didnt wanted to kill or being killed in South East Asia were caught by it. That’s how they got their total majority on the Campus and they defended it ever since.
Even what happens today on the Universities is nothing but a continuation, the next level of this ideological creature.
They are now very aggressive because their ideology on Campus is more dominant than ever, yet they being threatened by real science and facts, as well as external enemies which they associate with “Trump & Co” in the political leadership.
At the same time they are insecure, because of being mostly middle-upper class “whites” and therefore a shrinking group (because of their ideology), and some might realise that their beloved objects of care, ” ethnic minorities”, might actually not share their vision of the Future, while their pragmatic allies in the Plutocracy just abused them.
So they get into a hurry to “really achieve something”, fixate their “achievements” in society. And like always in such cases, in a way they become the “politically conservative” force themselves and want to use brute force to keep things together in their “60’s dreamworld”.
But one incident, like one from the above scenarios, and everything might be upside down in days anyway.
Like in most crucial times, just a few if anyone will have seen it coming.
does this feel similar in any way? Clearly there is a contrast, in that the late 1960s was filled with hope, and the early 2020s not so much.
No, it does not feel similar, in fact, it seems like an anti-thesis.
I don’t know how to understand or get around the effects of the age differential. Some of my grandchildren express pessimism that was unknown to me in the late sixties and early seventies. On the other hand, I clearly remember the stress and anxiety induced in my parents and grandparents by my age group.
@Iffen: Well said. I think it depended on whether someone experienced the individualist and Cultural Marxist impact as start to a better society, even world, or the final decline of the occidental world. This was in a lot of cases age related, because most older people were more conservative, while the young were the ones most affected by the new education and propaganda, but not just. Marcuse was old too then but very enthusiastic obviously. So were a lot of other old blokes with a similar attitude.
Now many elements of Western societies are ruined or destabilised, but the big promises of the 60’s were not redeemed.
The societal experiment largely failed, the plutocratic “elite” profited the most and concentrates global power in an unprecedent way in all of human history.
So how will it go on? A hard correction, a backlash? Inacceptable for the 60’s.
Let the Plutocracy go on with their vision for a global system?
Only if they make more compromises and do the societal changes they demand.
It reminds me on early Christians: Apocalypse and messiah didnt come: What next?
Step up with your indoctrination of the people, it just didnt work because they didnt believe enough! And the more absurd the ideology becomes, the more contradictory there premises are in the face of reality, the more radical they have to be in suppressing opposing views.
Some of the CM leaders waited exactly for that moment to excel real power with the supporr of their disciples and a large portion of the Plutocracy wants to instrumentalise this and ally up for societal engineering, rather than becoming targets.
But for the majority of people its a loss anyway because the vision of the 60’s failed and whoever wins, chances for more individual choice and freedom in prosperity for all will get lower.
There will be a bad compromise from the original perspective of the 60’s departure or something worse. Some people know, others feel it, the World in a couple of years might be very different and it can’t be much of an improvement for them and their children – if they have some.
This was in a lot of cases age related, because most older people were more conservative
Yes, that is the part that confounds me, apples to oranges, so to speak. I very well remember thinking that individuals and communities that wanted to censure Playboy Magazine were not even rising to the level of stupidity, yet this week I am certain that there is something very wrong with having pole dancing during the Super Bowl halftime.
I was born in 1964. Although technically considered a Baby Boomer, I didn’t think my experiences were much like those of my parents born in 1942. But when I look back I can see that the world has changed in some major ways. My brother who is only 4 years younger seems to be part of a different generation altogether.
I suspect it would depend on who you talk to.
Ask people who were benefiting from a boom in cheap, available education (relative to previous generation) allowing them to swift-step up the career ladder (inherently smarter than either previous or subsequent generations, or not), low entry requirements for relatively well paid low skill labour (due to low market competition), cheap asset prices relative to the growing incomes that they can easily capture with low effort, a relatively generous state due to low age dependency ratio facing fewer demands to implement more means testing, and the ‘Sexual Revolution’, then they might say it was all quite worthwhile and feel it was a positive time… despite the assholes in the universities, and the cults, and the terrorism and the crime. (Or maybe they’d see the positives as their ‘just deserts’ for their own awesomeness, and talk about how hard it was relative to today, who knows?)
People (older, poorly educated people, generally) who benefited from none of this, and only had to deal with the stress of the assholes in the universities and the cults and the terrorism and the crime? Maybe less so, to put it in euphemism, but most of these people are dead or not on the internet, so they ain’t a talkin’.
I was reading A Scanner Darkly again, admittedly a little out from this time frame as written in ’77, and it presents quite a dark and dystopian view of the then future of the 1990s. But it’s mostly a future of a frayed society rife with drug abuse and crime, authoritarian secret police, laser-rifle armed guards gating shopping malls, cultish psychological manipulations, but not really one characterized by any kind of economic precarity being felt by its doper cast. Evidentially near future dystopian imaginations had their limits.
The West lost its moral compass for behavioural norms. Its the Irony of history that you have Liberal Westerners which seem to know no shame any more and Islamists on the other side which want to cover women from tip to toe in three clothing layers.
Can’t they meet in the middle!
That’s what I’m thinking all too often. We had an ok compromise in the early 60’s, probably up to the 80’s among moderately conservative people (on behaviour and sexuality). This should have been stabilised and made the general norm.
But Wilhelm Reich and the corrupted mass media ate the brains away and targeted the people on their lowest instincts.
I’m not prudish at all, unless I think its dysfunctional and truly detrimental for individuals, families and society, what it became. What the other (ultraconservative/religious ) behavioural norms are too, just in another way, not harming reproductive success, but societal life and progress.
But I guess they will either ban such shows for Feminist reasons or demand gay and transexuals to perform it too. Call it discrimination if the audience doesnt like it. They haven’t decided yet I guess.
Besides, without panem et circenses, the West would burn already anyway.
So the third option are ever more extreme “games” for the male audience.
Probably concentrating on virtual reality while banning it in real life.
Like the (imho) foul and strange American compromise to allow all kinds of pornography, but ban prostitution completely with draconic punishment.
Probably they solve it that way, until they feel strong enough to take Western males last resort and save space in virtual reality to try to “turn them” completely.
By the way: Did they burn war toys in your area too? That was really one of the first not just anti-war, but anti-male actions of that kind. The initiative to ban war toys and games…
The people who went through the 1960s as young adults, the Baby Boomers,…
First, some nitpicking. I am confident that RK knows, but for the rest of those reading here: Baby Boomers are those (Americans) born in the years 1947-1964. I was born in the peak birth year of that period, 1957 (and apparently only surpassed by 2007: 4.308M births in 1957 vs. 4.32M in 2007. These 2 sites are not entirely consistent, but these 2 pages from a single site, for 1957 and for 2007, are qualitatively similar.) The point is that most baby boomers did not experience the 1960s as Young Adults in any sense other than the one used by publishers and librarians. I know many people born early in the baby boom and the trauma/excitement of the 60s largely passed them by until, say, the beginning of the Nixon administration (1969).
I agree with Walter above that 1968 was pivotal. I was 11 that year, 6th and 7th grade, and other than the 6 Day War,* it is the first year that I have any clear memories of current events: a bit about Tet & LBJ’s abdication, but much stronger memories of, in relatively rapid sequence, the murders of King and RFK, Paris in springtime, the Prague spring and early winter, and the siege of Chicago. The next several years were not quite as eventful, but still much more than anything since (even with 9/11) and it wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I realized that the period in which I’d come of age was not normal.
As a somewhat out of touch old fogey (I think Eh, Boomer? may be a better meme for addressing me), let me ask, what happened in 2015 that set off alarm bells?
*Because of my parents’ concern, I had heard about the war in Vietnam as early as 1964, and was very much aware of the fighting there starting in 1965 or 1966 because of the evening news, which we watched at dinner every week night. But spread over so many years, it seemed more like a process than an event.
I agree with parallel of 2015 to 1965. Both were years in midst of cultural discontinuity.
I am a late boomer, born in 1963. But I feel far more in common culturally with Gen X or Millenials than with those early boomers who came of age in the 1960s itself. And still cling to power, basically those born in the 1940s, who I consider “real” boomers.
If you’re curious, I recently wrote a post on this exact topic
https://praxtime.com/2019/11/19/y-u-no-like-boomer/
early boomers who came of age in the 1960s itself. And still cling to power,
RE: OK, Boomer
1964 Don’t trust anyone over thirty.
“In Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson the author argues that one of the reasons that the sociopathic cult leader was able to flourish in Southern California during this period is that people had no expectations of a future anything like the past. People expected literally anything to happen. No matter how crazy.”
Leftwing communities always build their foundations on visions for future change. This works out OK for society at large if what the Left wants to change actually exists. The excesses of the Vietnam War, and a lack of civil rights for minorities and women were arguably real problems that the 1960’s Left could change. But today the Left focuses it’s energy for change often around problems that don’t really exist or are very minor (the Nazi epidemic; disproportionately white on black police shootings; sports for trans women; a moral responsibility to help the third world immigrate to the West; white male privilege), instead of actual problems like white male suicide, pornography, the opioid crisis. This makes today’s Left potentially dangerous in a way that the Left generally was not in the 1960’s. But SoCal and the Manson Family may have been an exception in the 60’s era, an example of hugely misdirected leftist energy made possible by a wider liberal society that had lost much of its focus on real and legitimate problems.
biggest difference being demographic, and the levels of existential terror: in the 1960’s roughly half of the populace was less than 20 years old, males susecptible to be sent to foreign war at any time, and
“Rock and roll was indeed an extension of what was going on – the big swinging bands – Ray Noble, Will Bradley, Glenn Miller, I listened to that music before I heard Elvis Presley. But rock and roll was high energy, explosive and cut down. It was skeleton music, came out of the darkness and rode in on the atom bomb and the artists were star headed like mystical Gods. Rhythm and blues, country and western, bluegrass and gospel were always there – but it was compartmentalized – it was great but it wasn’t dangerous. Rock and roll was a dangerous weapon, chrome plated, it exploded like the speed of light, it reflected the times, especially the presence of the atomic bomb which had preceded it by several years. Back then people feared the end of time. The big showdown between capitalism and communism was on the horizon. Rock and roll made you oblivious to the fear, busted down the barriers that race and religion, ideologies put up. We lived under a death cloud; the air was radioactive. There was no tomorrow, any day it could all be over, life was cheap. That was the feeling at the time and I’m not exaggerating.” — Robert Zimmerman
I was sixteen in 1965. From a cultural standpoint that was THE watershed year. What came later, which is what people commonly refer to as the Sixties, was a diminishment. And it’s that caricature of the Sixties that’s more or less still with us. This isn’t just me, any number of artists, historians, musicians, and writers have noted this about 1965. So, no, I don’t feel that today is much like then, whether that’s what peaked in 1965, or came later. That world is lost to us.
I’m old enough to remember the 60s, but not quite old enough to have really participated. My family was conservative and religious, and despite abandoning religion I always remained at least moderately conservative in my thinking. But there was one aspect of the cultural revolution that was enormously appealing to me as a young straight male, and that was the promise of sexual liberation. I think that’s something that mattered! I think a lot of men saw the Cultural Revolution (which included the New Left) and the Sexual Revolution as a package, and that many embraced and promoted the revolution more because of the latter than the former. I’m not making accusations of cynicism or bad faith mind you, I’m saying two ideas were linked in everyone’s heads at the time, and so one was accepted along with the other. I don’t see anything like this going on today.
@jb: Yes, the “Sexual Revolution” was a strategy used by Cultural Marxism. In the end, “Love [Sex], Peace and Rock’n Roll” sums it up quite nicely. Add to that more individualism and consumer oriented lifestyles and you have it.
People were caught by a more “convenient” lifestyle, no longer constricted by “old fashioned” moral standards and reservations. Wilhelm Reich’s insanities were widespread and loved among radical students of the 1960’s.
That’s why the Plutocracy was on board too, they knew this won’t be a serious threat to their rule, but rather make social engineering, business and political control easier if they compromise. In a way today’s society perverted even Cultural Marxism, because now everything is becoming a commodity. Only what’s being paid for has a value. Immaterial and social values – or from a more rational perspective, non-economic, non-Capitalist societal and family values being devalued or reconstructed by the media manipulation from day to day.
What the current left is pushing is dangerous, but looking at its content, its so hollow, so plain. Soft topics for a social change which don’t even mention the real upper power structures of our society. Its re-eduction for those below the top.
To make it concrete: Imagine Greta Thunberg starting to criticise Financial Capitalism and the political Oligarchy’s corruption and hypocrisy? Not just superficially, but directly and thought through, by demanding real and hard actions which would cause trouble for the Oligarchy and its power base. And imagine she wouldn’t stop. But talk and talk, becoming even more radical with every day.
How long would she be the “good girl” of the media? How long would they protect her from criticism, even personal attacks and defamation which is the mainstream so keen about now?
The Left became as shallow as the whole Western society. So they have to make things up and being very outspoken about it, like RW said, even creating propaganda and educational campaigns for actual non-issues. So they can distract from their own corruption and concentrate on what they still can do – re-educate those which can’t help anyway.
I’m an old boomer (born in ’47) and as I remember felt in
the late ’60s that things were messed up but that (maybe) we
could fix it. I didn’t understand then the cynicism of our leaders.
The Bloody Sunday (Widgery report) — an obvious whitewash, now proven
Watergate
and for me especially important the lies leading to the ’03 Iraq war.
None of these had happened in the ’60s though we had plenty of lies
about Vietnam.
So indeed I still feel things are messed up but no longer think it likely they will get fixed before catastrophe.
“The year of 1968 had a lot of influences, but by far, by a margin, the duration, character and intensity of the Vietnam War was No. 1.”
I am just not sure about that. I lived on the South Side of Chicago at the time. I saw the King riots. I think that Vietnam was important, but that race relations were just as, or more, important.
The sexual revolution was theorized by leftists as part of their centuries long campaign against the family. But, that had been going on for a while. What was new in the 1960s was the birth control pill. As Jimmy Walker said, no woman was ever seduced by a book.
The pace of cultural change in the late 60’s seemed very rapid, much more so than today. I recall thinking in college in 1969 that the U.S. would be a socialist country within a few years. Notwithstanding Trump, my impression is that the social and generational divisions were deeper and more radical then. We would do almost anything to avoid living at home after college. I believe that Charles Murray has shown (Losing Ground)that there were distinct shifts in the trend of important long-term social indicators in the early 60’s. I don’t think that happened in the 2010’s.
When I look at what is happening today it brings to mind Sayre’s Law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” The Middle East wars ain’t Vietnam. Ukraine ain’t Watergate. The young “socialists” aren’t going off to live in communes.
Also, the music of the 60’s was a hell of a lot better and more interesting than that of the 2010’s.
@Walter: The ideas of the Sexual Revolution were definitely very attractive, but not necessarily for the women first, but for the males! The males accepted the “theory” for rather obvious reasons, because they wanted a Marxist revolution and/or sexual access to more women.
The Feminists were active in that field too, but the majority of women got into contact with such ideas by males which “seduced” them. Not books, but young “revolutionary” males and old professors were the transmitters. You can read some biographies of typical young females, active in left extremist movements, some even part of some sects or “communes”. Practically all of them were “introduced” by males.
Yes, the contraceptives were important, as were many other factors, but even more important was the change of the mentality. If you read old texts about family and sexual behaviour and what was written then, you see the difference. And it was in the songs, in the movies, in newspapers, at the universities, in the peer groups. It was a propagandistic effort which was supported by big media groups and influential foundations.
What the Vietnam War really changed is that the respect was lost and the priorities shifted. If you think you die in Vietnam or the revolution comes tomorrow, it really shows parallels to early Christianity: The old traditions and family values lost importance, were played down and seen as “something from yesterday”.
The young really lost their moral compass, so they were disoriented and Cultural Marxist ideas just made sense of it all: Now they could leave all community and family based values behind, become Capitalist consumer subjects and even feel better, because they at least leave free of prejudices and suppression etc. The parents with their warnings became “the bad guys” or victims, because of this “ideology of the oppressed”. But the truth is they just cut their roots and couldn’t heal that wound, tried to stuff it with all kind of crap. THAT was part of the American “sect boom” and “drug consumption” epidemy among other things.
’47 baby here.
Jon has some good points that I agree with. The first half of the ’60s was high school, but an intense period of study and observation of what was going on in the world, of which I still felt a part of.
After 1965, and through the end of the decade, life was an intense roller-coaster of questioning and exploring everything, with lots of changes.
I had no sense of an absent future, but just the opposite. There was a general feeling that the present was screwed up in an irredeemable way, and it was up to us to create a new future according to our vision, and that this was not only possible but required. This usually took two paths — revolutionary engagement with the current system or separation from it entirely, as seen in the many commune movements at the time. Sometimes both.
For many of my friends at the time, and for me, in retrospect, the 60s was a period of preparation for actively engaging in one or both of those paths during the 70s, but that’s a story for another time.
And the music was wonderful…and wise: “New boss is just like the old boss”, “Don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters”, “Teach your children well”, “remember what the dormouse said”.
@Obs: Yes, the “Sexual Revolution” was a strategy used by Cultural Marxism.
What exactly is “Cultural Marxism”? This sentence makes it sound like it’s a conscious entity. Is that what you mean? I hope not, because that seems to me to be conjuring up spirits.
If not, is it a set of beliefs? A group of feelings? If so, what exactly are those beliefs or feelings? I keep reading your comments and I just can’t figure out what you’re talking about. I know you think this Cultural Marxism is terribly powerful and terribly wrong but that’s all I can figure.
I agree with Walter Sobchak about the significance of 1968. William Manchester has a chapter in his popular history The Glory and the Dream called “The Year Everything Went Wrong,” which is about the events of 1968.
While one might expect a Kennedy hagiographer to highlight the drama of the year in which Robert Kennedy was assassinated, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that 1968 was truly an annus horribilis.
Sobchak mentions most of what needs to be said – assassination of MLK and RFK, race riots, the worst year in the Vietnam War, anti-war demonstrations, etc. – but one thing he neglects to bring up is crime. 1968 would be the first year in which the common phrase “law and order” would have political resonance because of rising crime rates.
Barry Goldwater talked about “law and order” in the 1964 election, but crime rates were still low and so he wasn’t able to make much use of the issue. The American people didn’t care about crime in the early sixties to nearly the same degree they would in the late-sixties. By 1968, homicide rates had risen over 25% in just five years and Richard Nixon ran heavy on “law and order.”
‘The males accepted the “theory” for rather obvious reasons, because they wanted a Marxist revolution and/or sexual access to more women.”
Young men mostly think, to the extent that they can be said to be thinking, about sex not politics.
Another non-political influence on sex was Hugh Hefner and Playboy. Drugs, sex, and rock & roll don’t need a lot of salesmanship.
@RogerSweeny — I’ve struggled with the concept of “Cultural Marxism,” and I’m still not entirely convinced it makes sense. The best I’ve been able to come up with is that both Old and Cultural Marxism see the world entirely in terms of oppressors and oppressed, that both see smashing oppression as the great goal, and both have little real interest in understanding what comes after oppression is smashed, because they believe that The Oppressor is all that stands between the world and Utopia, and that once he is smashed everything will just naturally fall into place.
The Old Marxists wanted to smash Capitalism and the Bourgeoisie, and the agent of smashing was to be the proletariat. Cultural Marxists have a somewhat different smash list — Capitalism yes, but also Racism, Imperialism, Colonialism, Sexism (aka The Patriarchy), Homophobia, Transphobia, and etc. — and the agents are now what Steve Sailor calls the Coalition of the Fringes. The thing is, whether or not the two ideologies have any historical connection, the mindsets strike me as being extremely similar. Smash the bad people and the world will become good. As I said, I’m not 100% convinced, but to the extent that I am this is the definition of “Cultural Marxism” that I use in my own head.
Born 1954.
As others have said, it is difficult to compare because I experienced everything then as a much younger person, and now as an older person.
The difference that stands out for me was the techno-optimism of the 60’s. You can easily get a sense of this by seeing some of the videos in the Prelinger archives: ‘Century 21 calling’, ‘Wonderful New World of Fords’ are two that evoke that.
The thing is if you put in ‘futurism’ as a search item, you get ‘Design for Dreaming’ a 1956 GM Motorama info-mercial, and even stuff from the 1939 Trade Fair, so maybe my perspective is just that of a young person’s.
Today, startups often have the mantra of changing the world for the better through technology, so perhaps futurism will always be with us.
World events were seen as ‘distant’, ‘not of immediate impact’, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was still the case for most people.
You mention 2015 as the year ‘many’ people became worried and confused about what was going on in this country. I recall noting a few years ago that your writings became less optimistic, dark on occasion, but couldn’t say if that was 2015. Why 2015, and what events prompted your feelings?
Born in 1961, I never felt at ease with the 60s culture. Probably just too young when it peaked. As I aged I developed rationales for my conservative bent, but at root I think it is based on that emotional rejection of the hippy way.
Compared to the current day, I am personally far more optimistic about the future than I was in the 70s, jr high and high school. At that time I and many of my friends expected to die in nuclear fire. Marxism then was far more dangerous than the childish socialism of current youth, in my opinion.
@Roger: Since I wrote long comments in this blog about the movement, I will try to keep it as short as possible without giving up necessary context:
Cultural Marxism is a particular, heterodox branch of Marxism now absolutely dominant in the “New Left”. When the rather orthodox Austro-Marxist Grünberg got a bad stroke, Max Horkheimer took over the Marxist institute of the Social Sciences in Frankfurt and founded the “Frankfurt School”. He developed a new Marxist branch, gathered likeminded people and disciples around him and created with those the “Critical Theory”. When the National Socialists came to power, they moved to the USA and infiltrated over the years all major universities in America and came back to Europe after the war. So they got a stronghold in the USA and postwar Germany and cooperated with American secret services. The Marxist French intellectuals joined latest after their break up with Stalinism.
Important authors for the theoretical foundation were among others Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucalt.
They largely concluded that the “white working class male” won’t embrace revolution if his standard of living is sufficient for his material well-being and societal participation. In part because he can still feel good in the extended social hierarchy of “gender and race”.
Therefore the classic Marxist approach in concentrating on socio-economic injustice won’t be successful. They were very Freudian influenced. Freudo-Marxism and Cultural Marxism were originally almost the same, but since Freudian concepts came under critique, not as much any more but still. Philosophical Constructivism (“there is no objective but only social reality” nonsense) more prominent as a basic intellectual foundation.
The complete occidental order must be deconstructed by re-educational programs. Actually its a more top-down approach. You don’t gather workers around you, but you get societal control via “sciences” and “culture” on your side as educational instruments.
To get sufficient votes and power in a Democracy, you promote immigration, social friction and “minority issues”.
They want people to explore their “individuality”, so that they lose conformity and further decrease occidental tradition and community cohesion apart from the institutional framework they created.
The autochthonous working class is no longer their primary concern, because with their stubborness to embrace “the revolution” and stick to conservative values, they became a burden to their “new society”.
The main modern creatures you can all recognise are “Sexual freedom” and “individualist lifestyles”, with the ideological red line of “political correctness”.
The American Plutocracy embraced these concepts too (not all), as they seem better compatible with their Capitalist penetration of all social spheres by eliminating naturally grown hindrances. Because the moneys grip and control being actually reduced by ethnic, clan, family, gender, other ideological and religious cohesion and identity
But these are exactly the targets of Cultural Marxism by creating -isms like Feminism, Sexism, Racism, Ethnocentrism, Islamism etc.
Most of the Cultural Marxist infected “social studies” do nothing but contemplate about which -isms are worse, more “oppressive”, where “the oppression” shows up or still not being recognised and how to overcome it. That’s their sole purpose: Social engineering and playing people out against each other. First reeducation for the students in the course.
And their “solutions” are very radical insofar, as it doesnt suffice to erradicate “the injustice and oppression” which might indeed have harmed individuals. No, they want to deconstruct, utterly destroy every possible, every remotely related structure too!
And this was what Horkheimer & Co. already said: The occidental culture and the white males are beyond repair. They have to be replaced to negate the wrongdoings and pathology of Western Civilisation.
That’s what they said, thats what they do.
So far only the Plutocracy really profited from this deconstruction.
That doesnt mean Cultural Marxists gave up on a matriarchal Utopia, like Fromm and Marcuse were particularly keen about.
This stuff is rampant in the humanities and social “sciences” academy, I was in a doctoral program in International Relations in the mid-90s and we got a lot of exposure to this stuff, mostly under the rubric of Critical Theory.
@jb: Thanks for your attempt to figure out what Cultural Marxism means and how it differs from no-adjective Marxism. I had similar thoughts. You say, “the mindsets strike me as being extremely similar. Smash the bad people and the world will become good.” I think that applies to a lot more than these two terms, especially if you add the implied “if you then put us in power”.
@Obs: Thanks for the reply. You make Cultural Marxism seem at least somewhat consistent. But I just don’t get that alliance you see between the American Plutocracy and Cultural Marxism (for one thing, it’s an alliance between people on one side and an idea on the other). It would seem that Cultural Marxists want to destroy the American Plutocracy. Is this just another example of capitalists selling the rope they will be hung with?
@Roger: About the alliance with the Plutocracy:
The theoretical and emotional fundaments of Marxism and (segments of at least) Liberalism should be considered: They are both fundamentally based on the idea of human equality, transnational, global unity and the priority of Economic Materialism to explain all societal structures.
In that respect they were directed against the occidental tradition, both in their own right.
But for the American-Capitalist alliance you have to consider the times in which it formed. It formed first during the second World War, when NS-Germany was the main enemy, Roosevelt was in charge and Eastern Communists allies.
Yet when the Cold War started, it was inevitable that social movements and Marxism would still roam in the West. The Cultural Marxists were individualists, against authority and “Totalitarism”, embraced hedonism and were rather fragmented, not that well organised. Rather a social happening than a revolutionare threat. Actually an immunisation against Eastern, orthodox Marxists.
And, most important, usable against other internal and external foes.
The complete merging happened with Neoliberalism. A multinational corporation which might exploit thousands of workers could still “be ethical” by minding gender and minority sensitive communication and “diversity management” plus “minorities” in ads and financing of “anti-discrimination projects”.
Like after the 2nd World War, its an easy and cheap way for the powerful and wealthy to immunise themselves from Criticism. They can destroy the environment and people, but hey, they are caring to communicate politically correct, so they must be ok?!
Also this relates to Globalisation: Now they are colourful places to work for around the world, no gringos telling others what to do.
The place being still owned ans controlled by the same Plutocracy, but now they are transnational and don’t prefer anyone. If you are a white male, you won’t be treated better, all people are being just equally born to serve them anyway.
By controlling what people are allowed to think and say, they feel safer. And they still feel more threatened by white males which might demand more, than by new foreign workers which just improved their conditions.
The Cultural Marxists are not happy with that alliance all the time, but they get corrupted. They need the money for campaigns (look at who financed the Clinton campaign!) and they need the media support for getting their messages to the young and keeping opposing views out of the mainstream.
Its like: You don’t touch our power ans money base and we can smash the rest of conservative Europeans together. We do the diversity stuff and you don’t let us do our business.”
Obviously that cannot work out forever, because the Plutocracy is gaining power and the Cultural Marxist anti-oppressors too.
Its like, not by chance, the alliance of the USA and the Soviet Union against Germany.
The Plutocracy, the Cultural Marxists and Islamists can only cooperate as long as they have a common enemy, which is “the non-woke white male”.
As long as it could, potentially, pose a threat.
In the end we all should know that big corporations and supranational state structures will control the developed world. The question is not that, the question is Who controls this power tools and for which purpose.
And sooner ot later, this has to get ugly. Because even among the Plutocracy are factions and with all they say, they know that you can be just on top or a slave in the future. And they will struggle for staying on top.
The free Liberal market was an interlude. That’s the main issue I agree with some Marxists: Monopolistic structures will emerge, thats natural. And they will merge private and state structures. True stock companies without one dominant share holder are part of that evolution.
Now Cultural Marxists are happy if opposing views, ever more categorised as “hate speech” being banned from Twitter, Facebook etc.
They demand it. But remind you of the Greta Thunberg example: If they become a threat, they are gone too.
Now I’m not sure who’s honest and who is not. But let’s put it that way: A true Cultural Marxist which the Plutocracy has not in his pocket will have to fight an uphill battle. Bernie Sanders might be the closest thing to get close in a while. Without saying he wont make big compromises too really wanting to attack the Plutocracy at all.
In that way its like 1965, we are fairly close to big decisions, not just for America, but all of mankind.
Another reason 1968 makes an appropriate annual marker for decisive change in American society is that it was the final ruling year of the New Deal coalition which had effectively governed the U.S. through the Great Depression, WW2, the Civil Rights Era, and the first two decades of the Cold War. Nearly all the major government programs we today associate with modern life come from that period of American history.
For twenty-eight of the thirty-six years from the beginning of 1933 to the beginning of 1969, New Deal Democrats were in charge of running the country. Only the eight years of Eisenhower’s presidency broke up their hegemony. And while Ike was a great president, he never challenged the New Dealers’ legacy in any significant way. Not in any of his policies nor in his rhetoric.
1968 was the year it all fell apart. That year the Democratic Party broke out into a full-blown civil war from which it would never recover. Like refugees from a war, Southerners and Northern white Catholics began to slowly abandon the Democratic Party – a process which was only completed in the early nineteen-nineties, but which began in 1968. This abandonment was painful for many of them. In some cases, they could trace their family’s partisan affiliation with the Democratic Party back four or more generations. The Democratic Party was all they had ever known and now they had to leave it.
The Democratic mainstream establishment in 1968 was attacked not only from the left of the party that year, but also from the right of the party. George Wallace was every inch the Democrat that Eugene McCarthy was in 1968. LBJ, a classic New Dealer, was viciously criticized not only by liberal college kids who wanted to end the Vietnam War, but also by southerners who wanted to know why he didn’t do more to achieve victory there.
I can’t recall if I saw it here before, but someone took a look with Google Trends at a few of the definitive terms and phrases of the Great Awokening, and the exponential explosion of it all actually started in 2012-2013.
I can’t recall the exact phrases they looked up, but doing my own search the trend seems to apply for “microaggression”, and also for some Counter Awokening terms like “redpill”. There’s also a huge jump for “woke” itself that starts in Dec 2012.
After some reflection and googling, I think it all started with the shooting of Trayvon Martin. That case was the biggest national scandal over race relations in a long time, and Black Lives Matter formed in its wake. 2015-2016 may feel like the watershed moment, but one could argue that the Great Awokening began on Feb 26, 2012.
Zach Goldberg is the guy who did the Google Trends thing.
https://twitter.com/zachg932/status/1133440945201061888?s=11
Alex Tabarrok has a lot of the graphs in one place, including thumbnails of a hundred fitted onto one screen.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html
I hope this doesn’t get caught in moderation because of the two links.
No, it does not feel at all the same as the Sixties. At least not to me. Perhaps others see it differently. The backdrop to everything was the war and the possibility of its expanding rapidly and, of course, the chance of being drafted. The music was better and more exciting. Drugs were new on that scale. There was a sense of revolution underway for better or worse. Of tears in society. Everyone was wondering ‘what next?’ And would it be good, bad, or just very strange. One shock or surprise came after another. So it seemed to me.
I should add that the war was televised in a way it is not now. It seemed the news almost every evening touched on firefights, helicopters and body bags and when or how or if it could end. It was always present one way or the other.
Razib mentions a very good book on Charles Manson and the murders he both participated in and encouraged. I highly recommend the book. It’s a well-written and detailed account of the SF and Hollywood milieus that Manson thrived in back in the sixties. It covers everything from dumpster diving to the highly informal LA music scene.
The Manson murders are also, by way of comparison, a highly illustrative way of seeing how quickly America was changing at the time.
In 1965, Truman Capote published his famous “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood about the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Kansas.
What’s remarkable about In Cold Blood is that Capote first read about the murders in the New York Times, even though there’s nothing particularly lurid or memorable about them. They took place in flyover country (Kansas). The case was a simple and straightforward robbery-murder of four members of a family. The victims were a well-off farming family, but otherwise unremarkable.
There was nothing flamboyant or sensational about the murderers, either. They didn’t cut words into their victims’ bodies or write bloody messages on the walls. They were both ex-cons looking for a score, and for whatever irrational reason at least one of them decided that night to graduate to murder. Nor was there any question of their guilt, even if both of the men claimed that their accomplice committed all the murders.
It wasn’t the kind of crime one would think ought to garner national attention. At least from our perspective today. But Capote, through his writing, made memorable what would otherwise be a sad but forgettable murder case.
The 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Kansas are only separated from the 1969 Manson murders by a decade. Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood is only nine years distant from Vincent Bugliosi’s book Helter Skelter, which was published in 1974.
Yet the two books seem to inhabit different universes. Capote could write about a 1959 case of quadruple murder and publish it in 1965 because by the standards of the time it was still a remarkable case. That’s why it was reported in the NYT and other national media outlets. But the only reason we remember the Clutter family today is because of Capote’s book.
The Manson murders, on the other hand, did not need Vincent Bugliosi’s book to make them memorable. The victims (including a movie star and an heiress), the murderers (a crazed and lascivious group of drug-addled hippies led by a wild-eyed self-proclaimed prophet), and the Hollywood scene of the crime all made the case famous long before Bugliosi wrote about it.
What a difference a decade makes. If the Clutter family had been murdered in 1969 rather than 1959, the national media outlets wouldn’t have bothered to report on the case and Capote wouldn’t have wrote a book on it.
I was born in 1954, so I remember the 1960s as a kid.
Several of the other commenters mention 1968 as a turning point rather than 1965. It seems that way to me too, but maybe that’s just because I was more aware of current events by then.
US society is polarized today almost as much as it was in the 1960s. What is different now is that the political parties are aligned on ideological grounds much more so than they were back then. Mark Hatfield and Margaret Chase Smith could not be Republicans today, nor could James Eastland and John Stennis be Democrats.
Another difference is that back then some of the domestic terrorists were left-wingers.
One other thing that is hard to get across to those who did not live through it. Today we worry that a rogue state or a sophisticated terrorist group might be able to deliver one nuclear bomb and destroy one city. Back then we feared an exchange of thousands of missiles obliterating all life.
You said: “I wonder if in some ways 2015 will be seen as a watershed. That was certainly the year many of us started to be worried and confused about what was going on in this country.” I started to be alarmed and distressed around 2003. I actually briefly thought things were taking a turn for the better by 2015.
Yes, I like the music of the 1960s more. I won’t go so far as to say it was objectively better; it’s what I heard during my formative years.
To sum it up, I don’t see 2015 like 1965. I would not want to go back to the 1960s. Race relations were worse. Life for LGBT people was worse. There was no internet. Pollution was worse. The nuclear threat was worse. Throughout my life I’ve seen an irregular but generally upward trend. It’s too soon to say if 2015 or 2016 was a major turning point to a downward slide.
I was born in 1948, graduated from high school in 1966 and university in 1970. There was a great deal of hope and optimism, almost idealism in early to mid 1960’s. President Kennedy inspired young people with the Peace Corp and uplifting rhetoric, President Johnson attempted to fix the the unfinished business of making African Americans equal citizens via Civil Rights and Voting legislation. There was a belief the world could be a better place if we just worked hard enough at it.
And it cannot be stressed enough, we did not have then the extreme economic inequality nor the extreme influence of Big Money in both political parties that we have now. Prosperity for the average citizen was taken for granted. Both political parties were much more attentive to needs of average citizens. Plus it was before globalization and job offshoring, and so jobs were fairly plentiful and paid well by today’s standards.
There was a cultural backlash against the 1960’s “cultural revolutions” that really picked up speed in the 1980’s. And a Big Business/ Wall Street backlash at same time to the government regulations and the unions that had tamed the harsher, ruthless impacts of capitalism on US citizens.
And so today we live in very different times. When the super-rich control most wealth and politicians primarily cater to their needs and wants. The young today have it much rougher than my generation – much higher university costs and poorer job prospects.
The one way 2015 does feel like 1965 is that “the peasants” are revolting.
I think the main reasons for the revolt in 2015 are economic, our elite has squeezed “the peasants” to the point where they are getting a reaction.
The 1960’s upheavals had a different causes, mainly political and cultural, caused by the Vietnam War, the various civil rights movements of minority groups, and a huge generation of baby boomers who took prosperity for granted and were willing to challenge cultural norms.
What was “Sex, drugs and rock and roll” in the subsequent 70’s, is “Masturbation, anxiety medication and autotuned pop” in the 2020’s.
I completely agree. From 1946 to 1973, the bottom quintile of American wage-earners saw their incomes grow just as much as did the top quintile of American wage-earners.
Changes in income inequality certainly, but, with the caveat that they are many ways to measure inequality, I would note that when we talk about the halcyon day of an equal America, seems worth commenting that American income inequality has shifted less than some other nations, and was relatively high in an international context at the midcentury*:
See – https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inequality-of-incomes-chartbook?time=1956..2014&country=CAN+FRA+DEU+JPN+NLD+NZL+ESP+SWE+GBR+USA
If you were to think about inequality *within* ethnic groups, and how the evolution of inequality is affected by attracting low skill and high skill migration streams, you might find that controlling for group and migrant family background bringing together more disparate skills profiles, income inequality hasn’t really changed in the USA that much.
(This is difficult for ideas that public trust in an international context is well predicted by income inequality. Americans had high trust levels by international standards back when income inequality was also relatively high? So maybe some other change.)
Maybe this income inequality was experienced differently (can’t challenge the experience of people alive at that time, comparing to today), perhaps because opportunities for real consumption were not split the same way, but the numbers are what they are.
*Though note also that income inequality in the US at the midcentury is more due to greater retention of the turn of the century condition, and that the US had more income equality than the likes of Norway and Sweden at 1900 (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4651453/ and http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Bengtssonetal2017Sweden.pdf for references). Difference being the compressions of war and different political choices in the early 20th century. Income inequality does not really have such “deep roots” (not in egalitarian vs inegalitarian European deep cultural strands, certainly).
Matt,
By almost any measure, income inequality has worsened over the last fifty years in the United States. But I wasn’t talking about income inequality. I was talking about income growth at the top and bottom quintiles of American society.
The U.S. economy of the mid-forties to the mid-sixties may have had a lot of major problems. Blacks and women did not have had equal opportunities in it, for example. The economy was also over-regulated in a lot of silly ways (e.g., you couldn’t buy and sell gold as a private citizen, for example) But if you were a low-wage blue-collar worker in the U.S. economy in the mid-fifties, you saw your income grow just as much as did the white-collar guy did at the top of that society. That is no longer happening.
I’m not calling for a return to the economic policies of the fifties and sixties. This income growth in all likelihood did not have had anything to do with policy. It wasn’t because we had strong unions or high marginal tax rates in those days. (Although it may have been helped – as you suggest but don’t quite say – by the lack of poor immigrants competing for jobs at the lower end of the scale.)
The ultimate cause was that productivity growth was higher in the U.S. economy of that period than it was in any other period of modern American history since. That could have been because the Great Depression and WW2 forestalled the advance of many productive enhancements to industry until after the mid-forties.
But for whatever reason, the large productivity gains of that period allowed for large income gains among nearly every American worker.
@Pincher: This has all to do with policy, because the end of Glass-Steagall act, unpleasant Globalisation, mass immigration and cutting down unions is all about policy.
And banning private Gold trade was not stupid per se, because gold and similar materials can be used to bunker money and avoid control, while making a remote gold standard more difficult . So to keep it checked was a measure (among others) to prevent inflation.
What really caused all this was when Reagan and the “Chicago Boys” started Neoliberalism big scale on behalf of the Plutocracy.
America was already on the way down in many fields, but:
1. While some measures were justified, most was just clientele politics for the oligarchy.
2. The whole geoeconomic strategy was shifting, practically in the expectation of the Communist competitors downfall.
This was when practical social policy making from the Left was almost completely eaten up by the Cultural Marxist insanity.
Radical Capitalist ideas of the Chicagoers fused with social engineering experiments of the Frankfurt School, creating an abomination in the form of “Neoliberalism”.
It became the mainstream for both American parties with only nuances of a difference.
Hillary Clinton was the peak of this trend of Plutocratic clentele with a faked hull of a “social movement”.
That’s why some Sanders votes actually migrated to Trump last time and this is why primarily indoctrinated young people, manipulated from Kindergarten over University to their “global workplace” were so fond of her. Not because of content, but conditioned feelings.
This time with Trump and Sanders there is something better in the ring from both sides. At least no total Plutocratic puppets. No wonder they had to come from outside of the mainstream of the major parties, because those parties are completely rigged and corrupted since decades.
Trump and Sanders have in their clownesque appearance both more to offer, as little as it is, than the generations of American politicians before. This is an evidence of incapacity in itself for the whole system.
The NYT is of course against both of them an write for “moderation”.
What is moderation in this paper and all the other major mainstream communication channels?
Its just a “go on for the Plutocracy” without deviation from the plan. Right now any disruption is better than a stable path towards the dictatorship of the Oligarchy.
The “political correctness” you get anyway and the Cultural Marxism with any candidate from the “moderates”. People should realise how they were betrayed and how corrupted the whole system became.
Conservative communities, European demographics and social systems being all ruined by the same developments. Its just some “right moderates” killed more of the social and some “left moderates” more of values and demographics. But these are just nuances and you get tricked by both.
Especially with “speech control” you can’t even articulate what really happens as a mainstream politician, because the mainstream media would down you in a shit storm. Like the NYT does on a regular basis (pars pro toto).
Obs,
But how did those policies impact the speedup of productivity between 1946 and 1973? The answer is not at all obvious because nearly all productivity increases in developed societies come from applied technologies which cut down on the costs of manpower, energy, and other inputs to doing business – and it’s hard to draw a line from, say, stronger unions to better applied technology.
What you also have to take into account is that U.S. productivity got a temporary boost from 1995 to 2005, as American businesses began to take advantage of computer technology. That certainly didn’t happen in that ten-year period because of lower immigration or stronger unions.
It’s very easy to see how policy can screw up productivity, but it’s not so easy to see how it can boost productivity above a certain long-term equilibrium.
One interesting argument about the high U.S. productivity between 1946 and 1973 is that it had less to do with what American policymakers at the time were doing right and more to do with what they had done wrong between 1929 and 1945. The Great Depression and WW2 disrupted the normal pipeline between technological discoveries and applying those discoveries to the bottom lines of private businesses. The economic and financial disruptions were so disastrous to American private enterprises that many productive technologies were simply not being used by businesses until after WW2 was over. Then once the war was concluded and the financial ruin of the Great Depression in the past, there were all kinds of technologies which had built up between 1929 and 1945 that businesses could use to boost their bottom lines. It was like shoot of adrenaline to a healthy young person who had been sick for a long time.
Is that argument right? I don’t know. But it’s plausible. And it has nothing to do with policies being made between 1946 and 1973.
I’m too young to remember the 60’s. My earliest memory of social trends around me is the divorce revolution of the early 70’s. I was no affected by this, but many of my cohorts were.
My impression is that the 1970’s was far more pessimistic than today. This was the period of stagflation, energy shortages, and fears of global domination by soviet communism. I think the social unrest of the late 60’s to early 70’s was far worse than the current period.
The Allen Drury novel: “Come Nineveh, Come Tyre” was a best seller during the ’73-74 period, and represented what I consider to be the quintessential “conservative” nightmare of the time. His other book “The promise of Joy”, was far more positive. It is also worth considering that there were over a thousand bombings (leftist domestic terrorism) during ’71-72. Most people have forgotten about this.
I actually think the ’79-81 period represented an unappreciated social transition. The 80’s was very different from the 70’s. However, the period since the 80’s feels like a much more gradual changes.
@Pincher: There are Kondratiev waves, productivity cycles, yes that’s true. But how do you think the USA financed their boom after World War 2? The big issue many people still don’t realise is that productivity and innovation are fine and great, it won’t work out without, but at the centre of most booms is money, credit, loans and payments. In a Western style state with a capable populace, finance is the main limiting factor.
Why is the USA still so big in many high tech branches? Because of the natural genius or the great Capitalism? The USA buy resources and mercenary expertise from abroad with dollars, while the home grown people can’t replace the high skilled sector workers any more, mainly because of the occidental demographic and cultural catastrophy. Not even with all the women being thrown on the market, having just one or no kids at all and being fully career and consumer oriented. It still is not enough and the gap is growing.
Its all about the dollar and from the 1940s to the 1970s the money and resources were first coming from allied, then from the defeated nations as well. Its not by chance that the big boom was directly associated with the Bretton Woods System.
And today its still the dollar, not as strong, but still. The FED is squeezing from the world and one of the most important factors for stabilising the dollar is oil and other resources almost exclusively traded with American dollars. Its not by chance Iraq, Russia and Iran got into even bigger trouble when thinking about decoupling from the dollar.
What made the situation for the people worse in the USA, and now Europe, is so called Globalisation, or better asocial Capitalism with open borders and Liberalisation of the markets.
When was the best time for European peasants and craftsmen? After the plague, when there was a lack of workforce, when housing and land prices were down, early marriage was promoted by the lords and church, rights were granted for settlement and work for a master etc. But that was a closed system then.
Liberal Capitalism in combination with Cultural Marxism completely ruined the job market and demographics in all Western nations. But if you would have a protected market, yes, then the market might even balance it out. The government and corporations would need to invest in the people, they would need to get higher reproductive rates for those with good skills, so the next generation will prosper too and offer higher wages, favour reasonable, sustainable values and behavious, caring for the social system and well-being of the nation. Even a purely Capitalist entrepreneur at some point would have to adapt without being forced directly.
But what happened instead? The American Oligarchy heads for world domination and wants to transform first the Western countries, then the rest of the world in a pluralistic mess, with individuals under the control of the big money and surveillance state (people remember Snowden at all?).
So instead of investing in the people and caring for a domestic substainability, the buy work force and cut the own structures down which might be a hindrance for total control. The USA in particular becoming a tech monopolist for important fields, military giant and financial control force, while many other sectors being neglected and let down. They have no priority any more and the other nations are easier to convince if the USA have open borders for goods and people too – so the money and propaganda can flow.
And since the people at home are now so badly indoctrinated and manipulated, they either don’t realise what’s happening or don’t even care any more, as long as they’re “doing ok” as individuals. No serious resistence anticipated means = we can go on with our priorities for the Plutocracy.
That was the main difference with Roosevelt and the first decades after the war. The Plutocrats were not sure, they didn’t feel safe. There was Communism, real revolutionary one, around them and there was Fascism just barely defeated. And they knew that there were even Democratic movements, which took Democracy and social justice (not what Cultural Marxists mean with that term) serious. They could get in trouble if not treating their populace well. That’s why Roosevelt first made the “New Deal” and most of it was kept until they could feel safe again.
A people, a nation, any group can only demand something if it can at least threaten too. If you are no threat, and no threatening group supports you, you are just a weak thing and can just hope for mercy. And that was never a good strategy, never ever. So the common American people either lost their voice or don’t even know any more where they are coming from and where they are heading to right now.
Financial Capitalism should have always been an interlude – it actually is. Just that those on top of the old system want to stay on top, even if the digitised economy doesn’t need the same banking system and investment structures any more WHAT THEY KNOW. So money being dealt for power, like always, but they have to do it quick, because the clock is ticking. People still look for the production instead of where the money is coming from, but that’s a mistake. Or does anyone really think that Tesla and Facebook have that value? Compared to a lot of other companies?
That was the same in Medieval times already. Byzantium created a centuries long deflation (Solidus! gold standard!) and kept the occidental world under its dominance. Now I’m otherwise a fan of that empire, but in this respect, it was just bad for the rest of Europe. Suddenly, when its system collapsed, not just because of innovations, but because of a new money system, Europe could grow again. Without the flow of money everything collapses in a money economy, even a fairly primitive one (Western Rome, early Frankish Empire) 2008 should have told everybody that lesson. And obviously, only those at the source and end point of the money flow can truly profit.
If the common people are no longer powerful enough to demand their share and participation, they won’t get it. For a real “trickle down” they can wait forever. Or when it starts, the next crisis will take it away rather sooner than later, because that credit bubble system is not stable at all – its so bad, it can’t be stabilised in a digitised virtual money economy with practically zero interest rate and less and less control for the flow.
And in a globalised, purely Capitalist system people are interchangeable, replaceable. Whereever and whoever they are. You can’t do that in a closed system and with accountable politicians, which decisions being judged by the outcome and not just individuals, but parties and systems being questioned. But that’s exactly what we don’t have any more and this is the result of political decision making over decades with the simple but wrong TISA propaganda (“there is no alternative”). There is always an alternative, and if there is none, for what do you need the politicians at all? But that’s just another propaganda-trick: “Politics is bad, economy is more honest”.
What a joke if you first make politicians your puppet and then comment on “corrupt politics” (the poisoner mocks the poisened) and how bad state intervention is – unless you need it yourself when getting into trouble, then the state is good enough and can’t do enough.
Obs,
Productivity and innovation are not “fine and great.” They are a necessary condition of real economic growth (i.e., higher output per capita). Without them, we don’t grow at all. Except by accident.
Other societies have had gold, wealth, colonies, land, slaves, financiers, and capitalists, but they didn’t have productive innovation and hence they did not experience sustained real growth like we do today.
You are wrong to focus on finance. Productive enterprises in the U.S. have never had trouble finding funds for operations except for when, as during the Great Depression, the entire financial system itself was at risk. And it doesn’t matter a whole lot where the money comes from, even if my own preference for political reasons is for raising that money domestically because I’d rather live in a country of creditors than debtors. But the U.S. grew fine in the 19th century by borrowing money from Great Britain.
Many places in the world had sophisticated finance without the sustained economic growth that started with the Industrial Revolution. So finance is clearly not the key to real economic growth. If it was the key, we would have seen real and sustained economic growth long before the late 18th century.
@Pincher: That’s why I spoke of Western style states with a capable population. Should have added access to resources.
If the term “Western” makes sense at all in this context, its about industrialised societies of course.
This includes basic technologies, infrastructure and education by default. So I spoke about trends within that developed framework.
The USA are indeed exceptional as for most of its existence the money flow was plentiful, except when the investment bubbles buried. Like in the 1870’s or the Great Depression indeed.
But that’s exactly what I was talking about. Directly after WW2 the USA could flood the foreign markets with their industrial goods and profit from the fact that America was no war zone and has plentiful resources. Add to that the USA could but resources and commodities at their conditions around the world.
The conflicts in South America and with the OPEC are among the most prominent examples of resistance to this absolute dominance. Like the exploitative character of agrarian corporations in Latin America and the American-British oil corporations in Latin America and the Near East.
That kind of high level, constant money supply is definitely not the rule everywhere. But the USA started after WW2 from an exceptionally privileged position.
Consumer goods could be very cheap even with a lot of social intervention, based on the quasi-colonial status of much of the world and because the Plutocracy was concerned about domestic resistance in the case of worsening conditions.
If you have just the innovations, but no capital, you end up giving those with money the helping hand fot making even more.
In the 19th century stubborn inventors and entrepreneurs could develop their own big business if they were ready to suffer. But many good ideas failed and most depended on banks sooner or later.
Pincher, apologies if I’m reading a tone which is not there, but your response seems a little disgruntled or exasperated somehow, though I don’t totally get why?
I thought it was interesting to go on a slight tangent to talk about the relative scale of the changes and give some international context, as people often go off on tangents as if the US were a society with a very deep income equality and that this has drastically changed.
I’m not disputing that higher income declines have seen stronger income gains in the US. Although whether these people are a static population or swap in and out is another question, and if you look at it by decile, gains by the lowest decile are relatively OK.
I’d also say that overall market income inequality does not seem different for the US and quite a few different countries (Germany, Sweden, Australia). That’s from OurWorldInData again. The difference between the US and these countries is in disposable income, after transfers and taxes are considered.
So I don’t know if lack of productivity growth for low income workers explains any difference in economies today the step difference with other economies today. (I’m not clear if your argument was that it does).
I can’t eliminate that it doesn’t explain earlier income convergence, though I don’t really know that it is clear that productivity growth was greater in 1940 – 1970 when incomes were compressing than in previous periods (GDP per capita growth seems about the same, age dynamics put more young people into the market, hours were not decreasing at a high rate and stayed stable (reduction had happened in the early 20th century, so seems like not much room for rapidly increasing labour productivity at a higher rate?).