Goldwater’s also somewhere you can look to understand how far right we’ve come. He was considered so extremely, radically conservative in 1964 that his defeat was one of the biggest landslides in American presidential history. Yet, if I remember correctly, in “Conscience Of A Conservative” I think he says something along the lines of “many unions are good and do important work, I’m just opposed to the huge ones and the radical ones.”
When was the last time you remember any Republican saying anything good about any unions? Like, even if he didn’t actually believe that, the fact he even felt the need to make that qualification speaks legions to the power and acceptance of labor unions in America at the time.
I feel like the loss of the communist bloc as a looming threat went a long way toward radicalizing American capitalism. There was a long period there where communist revolution was understood to be “plan B” for the working public, which meant the powers that be had a strong interest in making plan A look appealing. After the fall of the USSR the capitalist argument drifted toward “you’ll take what you get because you’ve seen the alternative,” and it’s not a coincidence that the upper crust became a lot more extractive over that period.
Of course this is the thing that leftists always complain about – how market socialism was guided by the CIA, how labour reforms were a sop to protect capitalists – and there’s room to criticize, in that the earlier concessions facilitated an exclusionary guildism that maintained the existence of an (especially black) underclass. On the other hand, I do like leverage and I don’t think the loss of it has been good for American workers or for the “first world” generally.
The leftist criticism is that these concessions stole momentum from an unborn revolutionary movement that could have fixed everything if only it had been brought to term, but I have no expectation that it would actually have worked out that way, so I’d be plenty happy to have a movement like that back again even if only for the express purpose of stealing momentum from it.
On the other hand, pressure for automation has pushed the UBI from the fringes to slowly creeping into the mainstream, and with the new President rising on Populism, we may see the emergence of a new equilibrium.
