by David Glenn Cox from OpEd News.
I am posting this article today to examine the political consciousness of middle-class America, a middle-class that came of age in the 1960s and 70s, was well educated, and mostly liberal as illustrated by the author of this article.
He grew up in the post WWII period when the middle-class had such great expectations for economic advancement. The US industrial plant was intact--about the only one in the world that was--the US military was in great shape and, above all, they had the atomic bomb--the ultimate weapon. The capitalist ruling class was drunk with a sense of omnipotence. The only enemies that stood in their way of world domination were the Soviet Union and the domestic and foreign radicals who entertained dangerous ideas of social justice.
Without missing a beat, the US ruling class immediately went on the offensive against all of these actual and potential enemies. In the US they purged militant labor leaders and left-wing intellectuals during the McCarthy period. They drew a line of containment around the "socialist" countries of the Soviet Union and China, they established a secret organization known as the CIA to subvert left-wing governments, to terrorize leftist militants, to assassinate leaders who stood in their way (including US leaders), and to engage in proxy wars. (See this for a good summary of all these activities.) Their actions resulted in two major wars: the Korean War and the Vietnam War and millions of lives lost.
Like many in this large subset of Americans, the author is beginning to see the current political drama starring Obama as completely out of touch with the author's reality. Unfortunately, his reality has been shaped by post WWII indoctrination that was applied to American educational institutions after left-wing intellectuals were purged. As a result, he has a warped understanding of his own history.
He has little understanding of what his country has been doing, and he romanticizes the New Deal programs of the Franklin Roosevelt administration of the 1930s that were reluctantly used by the ruling class to ward off more radical actions of militant labor and civil rights organizations. He doesn't see or understand that the ruling capitalist class has been moving in this direction of total control of working people since the system began in the late 1700s. Only now, since the American ruling class has gone global and doesn't need most American workers anymore, does he realize that things have really changed, that his government under the current "acting" leader, Obama, is not concerned with the issues that concern him.
His best understanding is that it has something to do with Ronald Reagan! Well, maybe this is not too far off the mark. Reagan's presidency did launch the neo-liberal phase of capitalism, however this is only the logical development of the capitalist system itself; and with it the attacks against American working people and the planet that its perpetrators are all too willing to use.
