The New Norm
Must It Keep Getting Worse?
It must be hard for people who came of age politically during the past thirty-five years to appreciate how it used to be taken for granted that increasing productivity would bring increasing wellbeing to the vast majority – higher wages and salaries, better social insurance programs, better public education, better pensions, and the like.
It was taken for granted too that national, state and local governments would be run efficiently on fiscally sound bases – that, when necessary, taxes would go up as well as down, and that the tax system would be generally progressive.
In those days too, the idea that a major city like Detroit would go bankrupt seemed about as likely as that a meteor would flatten it.
And no one expected that, in the near future, the very rich would enrich themselves egregiously, as they had in earlier eras, while the vast majority would become worse off. The expectation instead was that economic inequality would continue to wane.
There were anti-capitalists in those bygone days, many more than now; but few of them thought that life under capitalism was becoming harder to bear. Plainly, it was not.
Their idea was that a socialist alternative would be better still – that it would attend to fundamental human needs without having to rely on wasteful military spending or irrational consumerism to keep the economy on track. Under socialism, work could become more meaningful and other human endeavors more fulfilling and ennobling.
For anti-capitalists in the first three decades of the post-War period, it wasn’t so much a matter of escaping from a burning house as moving to a better neighborhood.
However, with the house not on fire, anti-capitalism never quite gained mass acceptance; most people were content to stay in the old neighborhood, and either to leave it as is or to try to make it better.
It was not just that the Soviet model scared people away from more radical alternatives. It was also that prosperity and good order were generally on the rise, and there was every reason to think that progress would continue. Change is risky; why chance it?
On that last point, there was widespread agreement. It was assumed, across the political spectrum, that at least some of the most debilitating kinks and flaws of earlier versions of capitalism could be worked through; that capitalism with a human face was a live prospect and already, in many respects, an actual fact.
European social democracy led the way. However it was much the same in all developed capitalist countries, including the United States.
To be sure, the American case was unusual in several respects.
During those decades, capitalist countries other than the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Canada, New Zealand and Australia) were still, for...
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