Thirty years ago, the old deal that held US society together started to unwind, with social cohesion sacrificed to greed. Was it an inevitable process – or was it engineered by self-interested elites?
By George Packer
The Guardian, Wednesday 19 June 2013
In or around 1978, America's character changed. For almost half a century, the United States
had been a relatively egalitarian, secure, middle-class democracy, with
structures in place that supported the aspirations of ordinary people.
You might call it the period of the Roosevelt
Republic. Wars, strikes, racial tensions and youth rebellion all roiled
national life, but a basic deal among Americans still held, in belief
if not always in fact: work hard, follow the rules, educate your
children, and you will be rewarded, not just with a decent life and the
prospect of a better one for your kids, but with recognition from
society, a place at the table.
This unwritten contract came with a series of riders and clauses that
left large numbers of Americans – black people and other minorities,
women, gay people – out, or only halfway in. But the country had the
tools to correct its own flaws, and it used them: healthy democratic
institutions such as Congress, courts, churches, schools, news
organisations, business-labour partnerships. The civil rights movement
of the 1960s was a nonviolent mass uprising led by black southerners,
but it drew essential support from all of these institutions, which
recognised the moral and legal justice of its claims, or, at the very
least, the need for social peace. The Roosevelt Republic had plenty of
injustice, but it also had the power of self-correction.
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