A Conservative Point of View, with which I Agree

The following is an excerpt from William Greider’s book Come Home America: The Rise and Fall (and redeeming Promise) of Our Country. Greider is a conservative, but he is a conservative that does not believe in the direction of conservatives have gone for the past 35 years. He is a journalists writing in the field of economics. Those who have read my blog know that I am liberal but also affirm many conservative beliefs but think the Republican party took a radical turn with the election of Ronald election and the Democrats have not put up much of a fight against the radical changes in our society. Read the following excerpt and see what you think. Better yet, buy the book and read it in its entirety. If accepted this would go a long way in getting the country working together again and put the middle class back as a primary focus.

3. The triumph of the free-market ideology and its destruction of an equitable society. For the last thirty years, conservative reforms like the deregulation of industries and finance and regressive tax cuts gradually eviscerated the government's protective mantle. Families were exposed to the harsh edge of market forces. Businesses and banks were freed to innovate and maximize returns, but also to discard their long-standing obligations to workers and society. The federal government essentially switched sides in the enduring contest between capital and labor.

The reigning conservative order, one could say, mainly produced more billionaires and debt while leaving a broad wake of social dislocation and insecurity. The purchasing power of industrial wages has been stagnant for thirty years, while profits and productivity have boomed. A striking consensus has formed among the political elites of both parties and, until very recently, no one of prominence was willing to question the reign of the markets.

One million households in the uppermost tier-the top 1 percent-now collectively earn the same amount as the 60 million families who make up the lower two-thirds of the income ladder. Major corporations destabilized middle-class security by walking away from the unwritten social contract they had once embraced. Health care, pensions, job security, and other elements of worker protection were gutted or revoked by right-wing reformers in Washington. This is partly why so many families are caught in the debtor's trap and spiraling downward.

But the conservative order has essentially failed as an economic system and its advocates are now in political disarray. It failed for practical reasons as well as its ideological contradictions. The size of government and of federal subsidies for financial and business interests did not get smaller. Instead, conservative economics merely withdrew the assurances business had previously given people, whether they were workers or those in need. The "market friendly" regime failed because it did not lead to the widely shared prosperity its sponsors promised would appear once they got government out of the way.

In another era, this economic deterioration would have led to a rapid shift in politics and the governing agenda, but it is not clear whether Democrats are ready to pursue significant changes. For three decades, most Democrats gradually retreated before the rightward march in economic policy or collaborated actively in making market forces dominant over government interventions. The social stresses resulting from the gross and growing economic inequality were occasionally lamented, but even when they held Congress or the White House, Democrats were largely silent on the wage question. The disparities could become politically explosive if a sharp adjustment in the US economy's debt-supported consumption occurs and families have no choice but to accept falling living standards. Many already are. The pain and loss will not be equitably distributed. The least among us will suffer the most, followed by many millions in the broad middle. Those at the very top will suffer hardly at all. Social injustice compounds desperation and anger. The politics of class conflict-supposedly extinguished by the prosperity that followed World War II-is making a comeback as America's enormous middle class is gradually being dismantled.

William Greider. Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country (p. 20). Kindle Edition.