Yeah, that used to be true (Part 3)
This is the third (and final) of a three part series on how our story has changed in the past few years. Things that used to be considered a part of our history (as reflected in the Virginia school curriculum I taught only a few years ago) are now significantly changed. There are many parts of our story that seemed to be true as of only a few years ago that a history teacher simply couldn’t teach nowadays without providing a serious explanation.
New Deal economic reforms. One of the pat lessons taught in US history classes is that the Smoot Hawley Tariff, which increased tariffs as a way to protect American manufacturing, actually hastened the Depression and made it worse. Students in Virginia schools didn’t learn much economics in their social studies classes, but one nugget of macroeconomics every student learned was that high tariffs can cause economic harm. Under Trump, tariffs became a routine tool of statecraft – and stage management – and have done harm to farmers, auto makers, and other industries.
Other economic reforms from the New Deal included organizations and laws to promote financial stability, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Glass Steagall Act, which regulated investment banks, and the Wagner Act, which made it easier for workers to organize unions. Glass Steagall was repealed in the 1980s – and this repeal played no small part in the economic crash of the first decade of the 21st Century. Reforms created after the crash, including Dodd Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, have been attacked and neutralized by Republican Congresses. Meanwhile, labor unions have been under sustained attack, worker organizing rules have been rolled back, and labor union membership has dropped precipitously since the beginning of the Second gilded age.
The Middle Class Society. Returning GIs after World War II – or the white ones, at least – faced an economy that was ready to break loose. Three years of pent up consumer demand, high savings rates, and direct aid such as the GI bill and federal housing assistance quickly alleviated fears that the returning soldiers would be unable to find work. Newly unionized industrial workers enjoyed increased wages and benefits and the country enjoyed a long period of low unemployment and rapid growth. A highly progressive tax rate helped create the largest ever participation in the middle class. African Americans were largely denied these benefits, but for many white people, the path to the middle class was flat and wide.
These gains have largely been reversed. Income for workers started to stagnate in the late 1970s. Forty years of supply side policies (regressive tax cuts, increasing deficits, and steady attrition of funding on social programs) have left our infrastructure in tatters, restrictions on social safety net programs, and increased inequality in income distribution.
According to Census data, analyzed in a Pew report, the middle class has been declining for four decades. The United Way showed that the number of people working fulltime jobs with healthcare and other benefits has declined precipitously. For the first time ever, a recent study reported that the average blue collar worker does not earn enough in a year to afford the basic necessities: food, housing, healthcare, etc. Forty years ago, it took a worker making the average wage 38 weeks to “provide;” now, it is 53 weeks.
The US stands 40th in child mortality; 32nd in Internet access; 39th in access to clean drinking water; 61st in high school enrollment; and 25th in overall well-being 9social progress index). Jeff Daniels’s immortal rant “When you say the US is #1, I don’t know what the f*** you’re talking about: Yosemite?” seems more relevant than ever.
Mid-century economy. In the post-World War II United States, big public and private projects were considered challenging but routine. We built the St. Lawrence Seaway; the interstate highway system; the Apollo program to put a man on the Moon; created AMTRAK, a national rail passenger network and Conrail to consolidate, operate, and return to profitability the remnants of six bankrupt rail lines; and constructed massive projects such as the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, and Washington Dulles Airport.
Under LBJ’s Great Society, the nation also set ambitious goals for alleviating poverty and hunger, improving education, and creating “safe, sanitary, and affordable:” housing. The Medicare and Medicaid programs brought affordable healthcare to millions of the elderly, poor, and disabled.
While some of those “Great Society” programs were poorly conceived and some, such as urban renewal and urban highway construction, had huge negative consequences, in sum they created a brief national commitment to improving the lives of the less fortunate. Such ambitious agendas would be unthinkable now. The money doesn’t exist and the belief that such projects are feasible and proper has evaporated. More fundamentally, the country appears to lack the vision and self-confidence to undertake “big” projects. Forty years of disinvestment and “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem” propaganda has created a constrained vision and budget environment where our national parks accumulate a $12B maintenance backlog and the nation’s bridges, water systems, railroad stations, airline terminals, and highways become increasingly obsolete and unsafe. Increasingly, our grand projects reflect the whims of a new generation of Robber barons, who decide what the priorities of our space program will be and which roads will be free to drive on.
Supreme Court. The 2008 curriculum framework for US/VA history contains howlers such as the following.
The decisions of the United States Supreme Court have expanded individual rights in the years since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954).
The civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s provided a model that other groups have used to extend civil rights and promote equal justice.
The United States Supreme Court protects the individual rights enumerated in the Constitution of the United States.
The United States Supreme Court identifies a constitutional basis for a right to privacy that is protected from government interference.
The saddest thing is that even as recently as my last year teaching (2015), it was still possible to stand in front of a classroom and make these statements. There were certainly cracks, even by then, such as the court’s absurd 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, where the Court said that, since there was no more racism, we didn’t need the Voting Rights Act any longer
Earlier, the court had abandoned two longtime principles (judicial restraint and deciding on the narrowest possible grounds in the 2010 Citizens United decision and the plain meaning of the words in the 2008 Heller decision). But it remained a closely divided 5-4 court, where several justices occasionally crossed over and voted with the liberals.
But it is only with the advent of the 6-3 Trump majority that the Court began the wholesale rollback of rights.
Most foreboding was the 6-3 vote to repeal Roe v. Wade, the first time the court ever took away an explicit Constitutional right that had been widely relied on. Other decisions that alarmed some people continued the Court’s recent practice of privileging evangelical Christians at the expense of other religions and restricted the scope of the so-called “Miranda” protections against abusive police questioning. Of even more concern was the broad signal by the Court that they’re not finished. Roe was decided on the basis of a constitutional right to privacy and the court signaled that it may be back to deal with gay marriage and other rights that are derived from a right to privacy.
This didn’t happen by accident. For years, the typical Supreme Court nominee was a distinguished jurist well into middle years who had been rated “highly qualified” by the American Bar Association, who agreed with the general philosophy of the president. This meant that they seldom stayed on the court for 25 years or more, were highly professional, and avoided ideological decisions. But after several Republican appointees compiled surprisingly moderate records, the party decided on a rigid purity test and appointed many people with no judicial record at all but who were highly ideological and relatively young so that, once appointed, they might sit on the bench for 40 years or more. The result is a court with not only w wide 6-3 majority, but one where ideology seems to be the driving principle.
Defense spending. Throughout most of the Cold War, and especially from the Vietnam War onward, there was significant controversy about the defense budget. A standard analysis was how many schools could be built or how many other social priorities could be served by the cost of some military system (e.g., the cost of one B-1 bomber, a day of operations in Iraq, etc.).
Indeed, until 9/11, the defense budget was in a significant post-Cold-War decline for nearly a decade. However, that situation was reversed with the 9/11 attacks and Global War on Terror. In the decade after 9/11, military spending increased 50% while all other spending went up only 13.5%.
But the remarkable thing about record defense spending is that the debates that once accompanied defense spending requests have been silenced. Now, defense spending is almost not discussed at all. Even after the final drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, there was no serious suggestion that defense spending should be reduced.
In fact, the nation is long overdue for a major debate on priorities. proposals to spend $700 billion over a decade for transportation or a variety of other priorities receive intense scrutiny and demands for dollar for dollar spending reductions, while requests for the same amount of defense spending in a single year are adopted in the blink of an eye.
In summary, when I look at the description of the United States that prevailed when I taught, it’s almost like the Virginia curriculum is describing a different country. And yet, with the signals being given by the Supreme Court that they’re just getting warmed up and the Republican assault on our democracy, it seems likely we will see even more things we thought were true erased.
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This series is written to promote political discussion and organizing. Permission is given to use this in fact sheets, talking points, letters to the editor, etc. We’d appreciate if you notified Gettysburg DFA (leonsreed@gmail.com) of any uses. Written by Leon Reed.