After WWI, coalminers across the country were organized under the United Mine Workers and successfully campaigned for higher wages and improved working conditions. Reaction took the form of employers who attempted to depict unions as anti-American because they were supposedly alien to the nation's individualist ethos. But during the Depression, FDR passed the Wagner Act which explicitly gave workers the right to strike, paving the way for a massive increase in union membership during WWII. Shortly after the end of the war, a Republican Congress under Truman passed the anti-union Taft Hartley Act, as part of a wave of anti-communism sweeping the country. Nevertheless, union membership continued to rise in the 1950's and reached its peak in 1954 when 35% of all workers belonged to a union. Absolute membership continued to expand until 1979, when it reached twenty-one million workers.
Since its mid-century high, the American labor movement has been in steady decline. By the 1970's, the rapid rise of imports undercut American producers and employment opportunities trended towards low-wage work in the service sector rather than high-paying unionized jobs. During the 1970's and 1980's, whole industries were deregulated further undermining organized labor. In this newly combative neoliberal climate, Reagan broke the Air Traffic Controllers strike in 1981, by firing over 11,000 of their union's members and banning them from federal service for life.
As I suggested in Green Dreams, the neoliberal ethos is also deeply embedded within the on-going energy transition which includes the Green Rush for non-fossil energy, electric cars and trucks, and all-electric homes, all supported by a grid potentially three times the size of the existing. This not only represents the continued enrichment of the few, but in the creation of green jobs, the spawning of a vast non-unionized low-wage adjunct to the gig economy. Decarbonization also portends a third wave of environmental despoliation in the global chase for the necessary raw materials and the unprecedented acreage of land required for scaling the capture of the sun's energy.
If, and when, decarbonization is achieved, American society will likely emerge with all its addictive, sexist, violent, racist, acquisitive, and environment despoiling behaviors fully intact and with its social services safety net in shreds. Our government will be in chastened circumstances. The American Empire, dedicated to the principles of extraction, exploitation, and impoverishment of 'friends' and enemies alike, through wars, proxy-wars, regime change, arms sales, and the financial manipulations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, will have withered, as the U.S. is reduced to a regional power amidst a multi-polar world.
Decarbonization, the rise of Eurasia, the potential collapse of Western Europe and NATO, the loss of U.S. hegemony, and the slow leakage of America's wealth to the Global South represent change on a cataclysmic scale. Paul Romer, the former head of the World Bank asserted, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste". Should we not take advantage of a shipwreck foretold? Can we not add to those historically significant moments of hope catalogued above?
I continue to believe that America's diverse people can achieve great things. May we be emboldened to confront the paradoxes of this country's conflicted existence and take more seriously Thomas Jefferson's injunction, framed in the Declaration of Independence, that amongst our unalienable rights as Americans are, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
The American idea was originally based on a liberal ideology founded in the eighteenth century that attempted the dispossession of aristocratic privilege. The defeat of George III and the establishment of the independent colonies as a united Republic afforded a remarkable opportunity to manifest the principles embedded in that ideology. From the beginning, however, 'Liberty' was so heavily constrained that only wealthy and propertied white men could partake of it. 'Happiness', as ever, depended on the achievement of living conditions that might reasonably support it.
This country's attempts to improve conditions for the pursuit of our unalienable rights have fallen into the abyss. We are closing in on fifty years of an ideology that has systematically deprived much of the population of its baseline psychological, physiological, and material needs. Income inequality is moving ever closer to the last days of Louis XVI. In the U.S., as of June 2022, the top 10% held 77% of the wealth and the top 1% held 32%.
While we await the revelatory mindset of the shipwrecked, there is no nobler horizon available for our focus than the idea of America.
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