Whatever Happened to the American Left? - NYTimes.com. - Sunday NYTimes opinion piece
by Michael Kazin, of Georgetown University, author of “American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation."
It begins:
And yet, except for the demonstrations and energetic recall campaigns that roiled Wisconsin this year, unionists and other stern critics of corporate power and government cutbacks have failed to organize a serious movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession.
Instead, the Tea Party rebellion — led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires — has compelled politicians from both parties to slash federal spending and defeat proposals to tax the rich and hold financiers accountable for their misdeeds. Partly as a consequence, Barack Obama’s tenure is starting to look less like the second coming of F.D.R. and more like a re-run of Jimmy Carter — although last week the president did sound a bit Rooseveltian when he proposed that millionaires should “pay their fair share in taxes, or we’re going to have to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare.”
How do we account for the relative silence of the left? Perhaps what really matters about a movement’s strength is the years of building that came before it. In the 1930s, the growth of unions and the popularity of demands to share the wealth and establish “industrial democracy” were not simply responses to the economic debacle. In fact, unions bloomed only in the middle of the decade, when a modest recovery was under way. The liberal triumph of the 1930s was in fact rooted in decades of eloquent oratory and patient organizing by a variety of reformers and radicals against the evils of “monopoly” and “big money.”
excerpts:
THE seeds of the 1930s left were planted back in the Gilded Age by figures like the journalist Henry George. In 1886, George, the author of a best-selling book that condemned land speculation, ran for mayor of New York City as the nominee of the new Union Labor Party. He attracted a huge following with speeches indicting the officeholders of the Tammany Hall machine for engorging themselves on bribes and special privileges while “we have hordes of citizens living in want and in vice born of want, existing under conditions that would appall a heathen.”
George also brought his audiences a message of hope: “We are building a movement for the abolition of industrial slavery, and what we do on this side of the water will send its impulse across the land and over the sea, and give courage to all men to think and act.” Running against candidates from both major parties and the opposition of nearly every local employer and church, George would probably have been elected, if the 28-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican who finished third, had not split the anti-Tammany vote.
Despite George’s defeat, the pro-labor, anti-corporate movement that coalesced around him and others kept growing. As the turn of the century neared, wage earners mounted huge strikes for union recognition on the nation’s railroads and inside its coal mines and textile mills. In the 1890s, a mostly rural insurgency spawned the People’s Party, also known as the Populists, which quickly won control of several states and elected 22 congressmen. The party soon expired, but not before the Democrats, under William Jennings Bryan, had adopted important parts of its platform — the progressive income tax, a flexible currency and support for labor organizing.
During the early 20th century, a broader progressive coalition, including immigrant workers, middle-class urban reformers, muckraking journalists and Social Gospelers established a new common sense about the need for a government that would rein in corporate power and establish a limited welfare state. The unbridled free market and the ethic of individualism, they argued, had left too many Americans at the mercy of what Theodore Roosevelt called “malefactors of great wealth.” As Jane Addams put it, “the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
and
IN the late 1970s, the grass-roots right was personified by a feisty, cigar-chomping businessman-activist named Howard Jarvis. Having toiled for conservative causes since Herbert Hoover’s campaign in 1932, Jarvis had run for office on several occasions in the past, but, like Henry George, he had never been elected. Blocked at the ballot box, he became an anti-tax organizer, working on the belief that the best way to fight big government was “not to give them the money in the first place.”
In 1978 he spearheaded the Proposition 13 campaign in California to roll back property taxes and make it exceedingly hard to raise them again. That fall, Proposition 13 won almost two-thirds of the vote, and conservatives have been vigorously echoing its anti-tax argument ever since. Just as the left was once able to pin the nation’s troubles on heartless big businessmen, the right honed a straightforward critique of a big government that took Americans’ money and gave them little or nothing useful in return.
I don't know whether Dr. Kazin has read Henry George's unnamed best-selling book recently -- I suspect he has read it at some point -- but he clearly didn't see the connection between George's central point and what Howard Jarvis did to the people of California via Proposition 13. Prop 13 is the antithesis of what George told his readers -- some 6 million copies of Progress and Poverty were sold in the 20 or so years following its publication in 1879 -- was necessary if we were to create a society in which we all start off genuinely equal. (My characterization, not George's.) Those who have read P&P know exactly why California leads the nation in foreclosures, and know the necessary-if-not-sufficient route to solving many of that state's economic problems.
George proposed to eliminate all taxes other than a tax on the value of land -- that is, he proposed to collect for common purposes the lion's share of the annual rental value of land, and not to tax imports, sales, wages, buildings, personal property, etc. Jarvis's Prop 13 put a low cap on how much could be collected in property taxes (in 1978, 1% of the 1975 value of the property, plus a maximum of 2% annual increase -- until the property was sold, at which point the assessed value would be reset at the selling price). George's land value tax would have collected the annual rent (quick and dirty: 5% of the selling value of the land in the absence of any property tax; nothing on the value of any improvements to the land).
It is no wonder that California's schools, libraries, universities, etc., are underfunded and not serving their intended purposes; that its economy is suffering under the burden of sales and income taxes. But all anyone writes about Prop 13 is "third rail of California politics" and "'populist' revolt."
But, as my mother would have put it, our educations have been neglected. Few of us have any basis for understanding that some taxes are actually good. (Even Milton Friedman, arguably inspired by Lowell Harriss, recognized land value taxation as the "least bad tax," though he apparently never considered putting his shoulder to the effort to enact it. One might wonder why -- and consider who buttered his bread, and why someone as brilliant as he never seemed to be conscious of it.)
George, incidentally, was neither left nor right, but represented a third way which appealed to a broad spectrum of Americans and others.
It has been suggested that part of why we celebrate Labor Day when we do is that George's birthday was September 2. I don't know if that's so, but it would certainly make sense. He advocated for ordinary people. "I am for men!"
If you'd like to know more -- in my mother's words, to fill in the gaps in your neglected education -- you might take a look at these pages, and the links from them:
I'm not sure the left -- as well intended as they see themselves -- can help us. They're no better educated in Georgist economics than the right is. But each can educate himself, and therein lies hope.
Further reading:
- Mason Gaffney's "After the Crash: Designing a Depression-Free Economy" and a related interview
- Walt Rybeck's "Re-solving the Economic Puzzle"
Neither the left nor the right will claim these as their own -- but they ought to read and embrace them.
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