Coming out of the twenty catastrophic years of the Great Depression and the Second World War (1929-49), the Western Democracies (Western Europe, Canada, Japan, and the United States) enjoyed a 25-year period of prosperity that was unrivaled in human history. It was a time of stronger unions, a rising middle class, unparalleled scientific progress, and technical creativity. The governments of the Western Democracies were more responsive to the needs and desires of their people than at any previous time in history. Those actions made possible the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., as well as the widespread and very effective anti-war, anti-nuclear, and environmental movements that swept across the Western World. It was during this period that the previously described ownership class found its power and influence at a nadir.
The Vietnam War and the Rising Political Power of the Middle Class
The Vietnam War was looked upon by the ownership class and its military-industrial complex as a long-term cornucopia: it would pump billions of dollars into defense contractors' pockets, make the reputations of military officers, and allow politicians to claim that they were fighting the evils of Communism without risking a direct confrontation with either the Soviet Bear or the Chinese Dragon. The ambitions of the plutocrats were to be sorely disappointed, however.
The anti-war movement that rose up in the United States was unique in American history. It was driven principally by three forces: a coalition of middle-class college students trying to avoid the draft and being sent to Vietnam; members of the Civil Rights Movement, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who took notice that a disproportionate percentage of troops going to Vietnam were minorities; and survivors of Joe McCarthy's witch-hunts of the 1950s. These groups joined together to change the hearts and minds of their fellow Americans.
In the summer of 1967, the anti-war movement gained strength with the rise of the peace-loving, dope-smoking "hippies" of Haight-Ashbury and the music of The Beatles, The Doors, the Beach Boys and Donovan, among others, which expressed strong anti-war sentiments. The January, 1968 Tet Offensive and Walter Cronkite's subsequent expose, in March of that year, of the real situation in Vietnam was enough for President Lyndon Johnson to decide that he could not successfully seek re-election as President in 1968.
The issue of withdrawal from Vietnam became the focal point of the next two Presidential elections. As college campuses raged out of control, culminating in the deaths of four students at Kent State and five at Jackson State in May, 1971, middle-class Americans increasingly told the public opinion polls: "We've had enough of this war." With the loss of public support, direct involvement in Vietnam finally ended, more or less, in 1973.
In the previous year, during the 1972 election, members of President Nixon's re-election campaign had engaged in a burglary at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington D.C. Nixon was later forced to resign, when it was revealed to the general public that he had authorized the payment of "hush money" to some of the burglars in an effort to cover up the crime. With his resignation in 1974, the political power of the American middle class reached its peak.
Lewis Powell and the Plutocrat Resurgence
Before the end of the Vietnam War and Watergate, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell wrote his infamous memorandum in 1971 to the Director of Education for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The program outlined in this conservative business-oriented memorandum provided the wealthiest one-percent of the population in the United States (and ultimately in the other Western Democracies, as well) step-by-step instructions on how to reverse the political, social, and economic advances that had enlarged and empowered the middle class since the end of the Second World War. In the minds of many plutocrats, these advances had become a threat to the power of the ownership class.
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