The Rise of Social Issues

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

The Rise of Social Issues

In the spirit of the 1971 Powell memo, the Supreme Court, in its 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, made it legal for wealthy people to own politicians and spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections and policy. Two years later, it extended the logic that such spending was protected by First Amendment “human rights of free speech” to corporations in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti.

Buying politicians was not only legal but astonishingly cheap: for a few hundred thousand dollars, a captive politician could shepherd through Congress legislation that would ensure billions of dollars in profits for his overlord corporate and billionaire donors.

The problem that the billionaires and their corporations had was that Americans were getting wise to the game. People in the United States still wanted—just as they did in the 1950s—the sort of social safety net enjoyed by the citizens of every other developed country in the world.

How could countries from Germany to Canada to Costa Rica provide a free or nearly free college education, free or very-low-cost universal health care, and excellent free public schools when we in America had over a trillion dollars in crippling student loan debt, more than 600,000 medical bankruptcies every year (the total for the other 33 of the 34 OECD “developed countries”: zero), and crumbling 1960s and 1970s infrastructure from schools to roads to airports and railways?

And when David Koch came along and transparently laid out the libertarian agenda, the shock was even deeper. By the end of the Reagan administration, most Americans realized that they had little say in the fate and future of their own nation and its domestic and international policies.

A diversion became necessary. Enter “social issues.”

The Supreme Court had upended the “social” hopes of white racists with Brown v. Board and subsequent decisions, and President John F. Kennedy’s decision to force integration of schools in the South lit that torch.

The Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 helped create a multimillion-dollar-a-year anti-abortion industry, particularly among the more cynical religious hucksters and TV preachers who began to thrive and prosper on viewer donations in a big way in the 1970s.

President Bill Clinton’s 1994 passage of the assault weapons ban kicked the weapons industry and their front group, the National Rifle Association, into the big leagues of fundraising and fearmongering.

Meanwhile, as Reaganism’s economic impacts spread across the country, destroying much of the white (and some of the emerging black) middle class (mostly through gutting unions and legalizing the corporate theft of pension funds), economic insecurity became widespread.

By 2000, a generation was reaching college age and discovering that they’d almost certainly never do better than their parents—a first since the Republican Great Depression of 1929 (yes, that’s what they called it until after World War II). Republicans, who had historically pointed to “liberals” calling for more unionization (the US peak, just before Reagan, was around a third of the country; most European countries are over 80 percent), an expansion of Medicare/Medicaid, and better schools, changed their sales pitch.

Liberals, they said, were fundamentally un-American. The American Dream, which the Greatest Generation had defined as a good union job with annual vacations, home ownership, and the ability to put their kids through college, was reinvented to be the lives of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Every American, the Republicans told us in op-eds and on TV, wanted to become a billionaire, and every American still had that opportunity—just look at Bill Gates and Steve Jobs! If we didn’t take good care of those billionaires, there may not be a money bin in the future of the average (but lucky or brilliant or inventive or lottery-winning) American.

Massive tax cuts for the very wealthy passed by Reagan, Bush Jr., and Trump—which, in total, sucked well over $20 trillion out of the economy and handed it over to the very, very, very rich—were going to stimulate the economy and expand opportunity. Everybody could one day become a job creator.