Progressive World Review

In a recent column, David Brooks tries to make the case that the problem with conservatism and the Republican Party is that they’ve strayed from their roots and are more representative of the “country club” over “Sam’s Club.”  Citing a book entitled “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream” written by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam,

They open the book with a working-class view of recent American history. Douthat and Salam write admiringly about the New Deal. They mention Roosevelt’s economic policies, but they also emphasize the New Deal’s intense social conservatism. Self-conscious maternalists like Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins ensured that New Deal programs were biased in favor of traditional two-parent families.

This passage is remarkable for two reasons.  First is the all too common trait of conservatives ignoring the obvious.  The New Deal represented exactly the kind of socialistic redistribution of wealth that conservative heroes like Ronald Reagan spent their lives trying to destroy.  One of the most popular and successful programs to come out of the New Deal was Social Security, but apparently Brooks and these two authors forgot that their latest messiah, George Bush, tried unsuccessfully to privatize and thereby dismantle this program.  Leading to the second point, which is the propensity of conservatives to claim as their own that which they cannot defeat.  The latest example of that being how Bush as well as some other GOP members took credit for the GI bill they tried so desperately to defeat.

It boggles the mind that anyone would try to link the New Deal with conservatism.  I don’t know anything about the Roosevelt’s “social conservatism,” whether it’s even true or if they really did make a concerted effort to bias the programs towards two-parent families but even if true, that would hardly make the New Deal a conservative program especially given that it’s universally reviled by conservatives.  Even today social programs are often geared towards families and children and back then, as Brooks points out, there weren’t nearly the number of divorces there are today, nor was there much in the way of single parenting and gays were pretty much completely in the closet so it’s hardly surprising that social programs favored “traditional two-parent families.”

As I mentioned, Brooks likes to point out that divorce used to be much less common,

In the 1950s, divorce rates were low and jobs were plentiful, but over the next few decades that broke down. The social revolutions of the 1960s and the economic revolution of the information age have emancipated the well-educated but left the Sam’s Club voters feeling insecure.

Trying to connect divorce to job loss is absolutely absurd.  As I’ve previously written, Stephanie Coontz’s essay, What We Really Miss About the 1950s points out that the social values, not to mention divorce laws at the time, that kept marriages together were a source of unhappiness for women,

Nostalgia for the 1950s is real and deserves to be taken seriously, but it usually shouldn’t be taken literally.  Even people who do pick the 1950s as the best decade generally end up saying, once they start discussing their feelings in depth, that it’s not the family arrangements in and of themselves that they want to retrieve.  They don’t miss the way women used to be treated, they sure wouldn’t want to live with most of the fathers they knew in their neighborhoods, and “come to think of it” - I don’t know how many times I’ve recorded these exact words - “I communicate with my kids much better than my parents or grandparents did.”  When Judith Wallerstein recently interviewed 100 spouses in “happy” marriages, she found that only five “wanted a marriage like their parents.”  The husbands “consciously rejected the role models provided by their fathers.  The women said they could never be happy living as their mothers did.” (emphasis original)

And of course this had nothing to do with jobs, which were the result of the overall prosperity of the time due to the war having recently ended resulting in an enormous pent up demand with all the soldiers returning home.  Brooks is correct that the fifties were happy times but not for the reasons he thinks,

   Contrary to widespread belief, the 1950s was not an age of laissez-faire government and free market competition.  A major cause of the social mobility of young families in the 1950s was that federal assistance programs were much more generous and widespread than they are today.

     In the most ambitious and successful affirmative action program ever adopted in America, 40 percent of young men were eligible for veterans’ benefits, and these benefits were far more extensive than those available to Vietnam-era vets.  Financed in part by a federal income tax on the rich that went up to 87 percent and a corporate tax rate of 52 percent, such benefits provided quite a jump start for a generation of young families.  The GI bill paid most tuition costs for vets who attended college, doubling the percentage of college students from prewar levels.  At the other end of the life span, Social Security began to build up a significant safety net for the elderly, formerly the poorest segment of the population.  Starting in 1950, the federal government regularly mandated raises in the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation.  The minimum wage may have been only $1.40 as late as 1968, but a person who worked for that amount full-time, year-round, earned 118 percent of the poverty figure for a family of three.  By 1995, a full-time minimum-wage worker could earn only 72 percent of the poverty level.

     An important source of the economic expansion of the 1950s was that public works spending at all levels of government comprised nearly 20 percent of total expenditures in 1950, as compared to less than 7 percent in 1984.  Between 1950 and 1960, nonmilitary, nonresidential public construction rose by 58 percent.  Construction expenditures for new schools (in dollar amounts adjusted for inflation) rose by 72 percent; funding on sewers and waterworks rose by 46 percent.  Government paid 90 percent of the costs of building the new Interstate Highway System.  These programs opened up suburbia to growing numbers of middle-class Americans and created secure, well-paying jobs for blue-collar workers.

And in yet another astounding display of delusion, Brooks, like virtually all conservatives, tries to peg liberals as elitists and cites the “education gap” as the reason,

Gaps are opening between the educated and less educated. Working-class divorce rates remain high, while the mostly upper-middle-class parents of Ivy Leaguers have divorce rates of only 10 percent. Working-class kids are unlikely to complete college, affluent kids usually do.

Completely ignoring the record number of vets who used their GI benefits to fund a college education, which is exactly what the aforementioned GI bill that conservatives tried to defeat is trying to replicate.

I could go on and on but you get the point.  I’m certainly not going to try and defend every liberal program ever presented but the history is clear, liberals have always fought not only for equal rights for all Americans, gay, straight, black, white, single parent or not, liberals have also championed workers causes such as union representation, health care and the forty hour work week just to name a few.  That Republicans are the party of the working class is delusional to the extreme and only exists in Brook’s fevered imagination.

–Paul Wilden

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