How They Built The World
No one saw Donald Trump coming.
Like a heart attack in the dead of the night he has awoken a slumbering political class. Simmering tensions have begun to boil over. The world seems completely enthralled by him, continually guessing what he will do next. A trade war with China. The “Muslim Ban”. Today’s policy is tomorrow’s outrage.
Why, the question goes, would people vote for such a man? Or from the other side, why would you not?
In Britain, an establishment is taken aghast at Brexit, in the EU it is the rise of populist parties. These disparate events and people are defined more by what they oppose than any alternative. Political correctness and social justice. The free market and globalisation. It is this strange cocktail of ideas which form the backbone of the political discourse.
But it was not always so. All ideas have their origin. All rivers have a source.
This is the story of the ideas which divide us, and the people who brought them about. It is a story of the rejects and renegades. Outsiders, who took on the existing systems, who battled ageing ideologies and offered radical alternatives. And who, most surprisingly of all, won.
The Times They are a Changin’
“If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’”
– Martin Luther King
Pax Romana was the long peace of the Roman Empire. The calm after the storm of expansion, when the emperors could stretch their legs. But Rome understood peace is kept at the point of a sword. Or in Roosevelt’s words “speak quietly but carry a big stick”. Pax Americana was no different. Superman became an icon for the era, “limitless strength tempered by compassion”. Yet, Superman is not known for diplomacy, he beats his enemies into submission, and those with big sticks sooner or later start swinging. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
The Cold War it may be called, but across the unaligned third world the fires raged. It would be the Vietnam War which seared itself into the American psyche and turned a people against its government. Amongst them was C. Wright Mills, an enigmatic sociologist with a tremendous appetite. He would come to define the opposition to the war.
Mills had grown up a nomad, his family shuffling between the bustling Texan cities. Lasting friendships were rare, and the isolation forced him — like many lonely children — to immerse himself in the world of ideas. Unsurprisingly, he chose to pursue an academic career, and was incredibly successful. But the gypsy life never left him, and whilst many find themselves weighed down by academia, Mills remained footloose and free.
At university, surrounded by flannel-suit professors, he was a curiosity. A stranger to moderation, Mills would eat a cake in a sitting, chain-smoke cigars from dusk till dawn, and ride his motorbike to and from class. He wrote fiendishly, railing against the perils of a mass society. Above all, Mills feared the trapping of the human spirit by the “iron cage of bureaucratic rationality”.
Of himself he said, “I am an outlander, not only regionally, but deep down and for good.” This isolationist outlook made him fiercely combative in his work. Mills fearlessly lampooned both the conservatives and the liberals. He saw the US and Soviet Union as converging bureaucratic monoliths.
What was needed was something new.
Mills left the US in exile after the academic community turned on him. He would tour Latin America and Europe, even visiting Castro to discuss his work. He had always been a “man in search of his destiny”, instead he found his people. Back home, a constellation of groups ranging from the African-American civil rights activists to the feminists were linking arms in opposition to the war. Young meritocratic students who had entered university in mass numbers looked out at the world and saw an old guard as obsolete and archaic. The images beamed back from the war told a story in black and white, but the new generation dreamed of a world in technicolour.
Collectively, Mills called them the “New Left”.
This movement shed the ideas of the class struggle (the working class was a “legacy from Victorian Marxism”), instead focusing on the ideas of alienation and commodification which Mills had championed. Marxist ideas of oppression persisted, but were reframed around race, gender and sexuality.
In 1962 Mills would die of a heart attack. He was only forty-five. But he would live on in the movement he had named.
“His argument that an overlapping triumvirate of economic, military, and political forces constituted an elite that called all the shots in American life, keeping a perpetual war economy going, was a staple of oppositional thinking in the anti-Vietnam War era.”
Two activists set themselves on fire in 1965 such was the raw feeling, and in 1967 100,000 people marched upon the capital. MLK opposed the war, and Muhammad Ali risked prison for refusing the draft. Countercultural movements drew inspiration from groups like the Black Panthers to create a broad-based, grass roots movement.
It worked so well it gave birth to the environmental movement, and reinvigorated the feminists, who formed the off-shoot Women’s Liberation Movement. Cultural change had been central to the New Left, and this second-wave of feminism began to question everything — sexuality, family, the work place, and the ‘othering’ of women were all discussed during ‘consciousness raising sessions’.
The patriarchy formed as a central thesis. Drawing upon the Millsian idea of oppression, women were seen as an oppressed group by a male-dominated social hierarchy. Similar concepts emerged in the gay liberation movement, where heteronormality was seen to oppress the gay (and later trans) community; and in terms of race, where whites were seen to hold perpetual power over oppressed people of colour.
Shulamith Firestone laid it out:
“[T]he end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”
Later writers like Judith Butler took this further, asserting a post-modernist interpretation where sex and gender are simply artefacts of language and culture devoid of biology.
Leftist history is a swirling mosaic of groups in constant (and often violent) flux. The ideas of the sixties gestated in the womb of the university, as each passing year the faculty moved further left-ward, crystallising around what today is called identity politics.
A question remains why such movements grew so quickly. Some have argued American power and affluence was the root cause of the unrest, a ‘beat generation’ had formed which refused to conform, becoming innately countercultural. By the beginning of the 70s the movement had begun to fracture. The violence of the radical elements pushed the moderate members into the Democratic party. Feminist, black and gay voices formed new pillars within the Democratic establishment. Nixon began winding down of the war, and an economic downturn spelled the end of the movement. As Hunter S. Thompson wrote ‘” Consciousness Expansion” went out with LBJ … and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon’.
The good times were over.
Don’t Stop Believin’
In the early seventies, the two great American parties overlapped, with many senators and representatives lying between the most conservative Democrat and the most liberal Republican. Within ten years that had changed.
The traditional narrative blames Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’. Republicans (previously the party of Lincoln) would woo the Deep South with dog-whistle racism due to outrage over the Democrats backing the civil rights act. This is a myth. Nixon himself lost the Deep South in 1968, whereas Jimmy Carter would sweep the region in 1976.
Scholars have argued economic pressure explains the movement of conservative voters over to the Democrats, not race. The segregation would not be of blacks and whites, but Democrats and Republicans, unable to agree upon the role of government. The recession of the 70s was just the fuel on the fire. Anger over Vietnam had created a growing cynicism, when Watergate erupted trust evaporated.
In his inaugural address Reagan said “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” The people agreed. The Right under Nixon had argued from an economic standpoint, under Reagan it would embrace the identity politics of the New Left. Reagan’s message at its core was economic but it was wrapped in morality, like a rifle in a blanket. The role of government became a matter of belief. This was no accident.
In 1968 a man called Paul Weyrich infiltrated the New Left grass-root organisations, he saw a well organised movement able to mobilise in a way the Right could not. He entered out of a fear the Left was about to take over, now he began to worry this was a foregone conclusion. Frantically he searched for an untapped conservative population who could be relied upon to spread the message. He settled upon fundamentalist and evangelical Christians.
The group had mostly shunned politics living a quiet moral life dedicated to the immaterial. Yet in a short time they would help bring to power a set of policies which ushered an era of rampant materialism. It was nothing short of miraculous.
The politics of the Left and Right have always been a push and pull, a ying and yang. The former pushes forward with towards a vision of a better world, the latter pulls back warning things can always get worse. It was this dynamic which Weyrich relied upon. The liberal agenda of sexual liberation, gay rights, and abortion, as well as the banning of public-school prayer (Supreme Court 1962) had began to rile the Christian populace.
Previously, they had reckoned if government left them and their families alone, they were happy to return the favour. President Jimmy Carter, a devout Christian, would surprise everyone by shattering this tacit agreement. He straddled both sides of the conflict, yet when he abolished charity status for fundamentalist religious schools, he placed himself firmly amongst the liberals. Conservative Christian America felt stabbed in the back. As Baptist minister and prominent televangelist Jerry Falwell diagnosed in 1976 “Americans have literally stood by and watched as godless, spineless leaders have brought our nation floundering to the brink of death.”
In 1979 Weyrich met Falwell and other activists in a Holiday Inn outside Lynchburg, Virginia, forming ‘Moral Majority’. Utilising Falwell’s shows, publications and mailing lists, Weyrich and the others set to work pushing an agenda which was pro-life, pro-family, and above all “pro-American”. Falwell claimed the 1980 Reagan victory as his own. It’s hard to disagree.
The Left had been beaten at its own game.
Reagan tried reimplementing prayer in the classroom, elsewhere little would be done. Abortion remained intact and gay rights were unaffected. It was as if he had been playing lip service, preferring to champion a radical economic agenda. Reaganomics would change the world, heralding a global economy as radical in scope as the vision of any revolutionary socialist. But he had helped awaken the slumbering beast of evangelical America — it remains to this day.
Everybody Wants To Rule The World
Back in 1943, at the height of the war, a year before Bretton Woods rewrote the economic world order (creating both the IMF and World Bank) a Polish economist had prophesised a turbulent and polarising future.
His name was Michal Kalecki. Sceptical by nature, he stated the proposed full-employment of post-war economies would yield disaster. The worker and labour unions would grow in power, wages would rise as a result, eventually outstripping productivity. Increasing prices would precipitate spiralling inflation. Strikes would become the norm. It would peak with a capitalist class rebelling to enforce market discipline and price stability. Welfare would be rolled back, unions busted. Kalecki called it the future, today we call it the seventies.
Britain suffered constant strikes. Inflation peaked at 20%, and national debt rose sharply. Edward Heath would institute a three-day week over worries of black-outs. Even when the recession ended growth remained sluggish. The Labour government was forced to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout. Strikes became an emblem of the era, and the chaos seemed without end. In 1978, the infamous ‘Winter of Discontent’ proved to be a breaking point. Strikes meant waste was piled high attracting rats, while bodies were left unburied. The people lost faith in the system.
Conservative party leader Margaret Thatcher promised to end inflation and tame the trade unions. “Labour isn’t working” went the slogan, it captured the mood of the country. Whether by remarkable luck or the invisible hand of fate, across the pond Reagan had also declared government the problem. The Iron Lady offered the solution when she threw down a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s ‘The Constitution of Liberty’ sternly proclaiming “This is what we believe”. Kalecki’s revolution had begun.
It’s an odd happenstance of history which led to Hayek defining the late-twentieth century. Hayek had opposed almost every thing that defined the post-war era. His 1944 magnus opus ‘The Road to Serfdom’ warned of the perils of central planning and the abandonment of individualism. Hayek may as well have been shouting into the wind. For him the post-war years were a dark age.
Instead we turn to an obscure and eccentric Englishman called Anthony Fisher, he would do more than anyone to spread the ideas of a free-market. Ironically Fisher had made his money in the ordered and rigidly planned world of battery cage chickens (as well as a misstep into Turtle farming). But in 1955 he used his fortune to set up the ‘Institute for Economic Affairs’. It would be amongst the world’s first ‘Think Tank’s’, an almost Orwellian neologism. Hayek had warned Fisher against lobbying through universities, which were entrenched with Leftist (Keynesian) thinking. The Think Tank would be the Right’s answer, and it would dominate the political landscape into the present day.
The Think Tank’s mission was clear: it aimed to reframe the debate. Oliver Smedley (a co-founder of the Institute) wrote to Fisher:
“[It is] imperative that we should give no indication in our literature that we are working to educate the public along certain lines which might be interpreted as having a political bias. … That is why the first draft [of the IEA’s aims] is written in rather cagey terms”.
Fisher and the others plugged away, and when in the 70s Michal Kalecki’s prophecy was writ large, Fisher and Hayek were thrust into the mainstream. Fisher become involved in over a dozen Think Tanks on both sides of the pond, pushing free-market thought into the heart of the White House.
If Reagan and Thatcher were ideological soulmates, then Hayek was the vicar at the wedding.
A triad of policies began to dominate the discourse: free markets, privatisation, and financialization. The post-war economist Keynes had said when times get tough governments get spending, Hayek told the government to get going. Leave everything to the market. The freer the market, the freer the people.
Supply-side economics saw the worker as a consumer, the community as a shopping centre. A global economy flooded western markets with cheap goods, wages stagnated as a result. Western manufactures were unable to compete, and many went bust. Over the following decades workers at the bottom would see little recompense for their increasing productivity. However, the deregulation of the financial industry meant western economies became awash with credit. Mortgages and credit cards allowed people to keep spending far beyond what they could afford. Combined with cheap goods it gave the illusion of prosperity. As economist Mark Blyth describes:
“This shift from taxes to debt initially bought time for capitalism: it restored profits, destroyed labor’s ability to demand wage increases, tamed inflation to the point of deflation (which increases the real value of debt), and even seemed to provide prosperity for all after the crisis of the 1970s.”
Kalecki died in 1970 jaded by the political developments. His prophesy had gone unheeded. When the capitalist revolution occurred, he had been forgotten. The trade unions accustomed to flexing their muscle were caught unawares. But they would not go gently into the night.
Another One Bites the Dust
When Thatcher moved to shut down the British coal industry, miners launched the most bitter industrial dispute in the nations history. In contrast to the US, unions remained a major aspect of life throughout the post-war years. Few industries were as much a closed shop as mining. The National Union of Mineworkers was immensely powerful, led by the notorious Arthur Scargill, a socialist with strong leanings towards communism. Mines had been closed before, but both Scargill and Thatcher understood this was not a battle over electrical power, but political power. Whoever won would shape the times to come.
Thatcher sought to diversify Britain’s energy needs into gas and nuclear, besides a globalising economy allowed the importation of coal at lower prices. On 6 March 1984 it was announced twenty collieries would close, costing twenty-thousand jobs, six days later Scargill supported regional marches across the country.
The ‘Battle of Orgreave’ would be the defining moment which “changed, forever … how [the] country function[ed] as an economy and as a democracy”. Historian and Labour MP Tristram Hunt described it as “almost medieval in its choreography”. Five-thousand pickets faced off against six-thousand officers equipped with riot gear, police dogs, and a cavalry force of forty-two mounted officers — this was no small skirmish. The violence would culminate in a cavalry charge into the pickets, truncheons drawn. The miners responded with a barrage of stones. In the end fifty-one pickets and seventy-two policemen were injured.
Many have charged the government with wanting to break the miners. David Hart an advisor to Margaret Thatcher stated “It was a battle ground of our choosing on grounds of our choosing. I don’t think that Scargill believes that even today. The fact is that it was a set-up and it worked brilliantly.” This has been denied by people who worked alongside him, but there is no doubt the tactics worked.
Violence continued on a much smaller scale, but by September miners were crossing the picket line and returning to work. Scargill refused to call a national ballot on the strikes citing the violence at Orgreave. This irked many miners, including the Nottinghamshire union who had previously voted against strikes and considered them unconstitutional. After a reshuffling of its leaders it opposed Scargill and stopped payments to strikers.
Public opinion began shifting over the episode in favour of the employers. The strikes would forever tar trade unions, and resulted in some of the most anti-trade union laws known in the western world. Scargill had been played. Unions also saw a continual decline of power under Reagan, with a resultant decline in wages. Today 11% of Americans and 23.2% of all Brits are members of union.
Manufacturing was replaced by the service industry across the advanced economies. Areas like the North of England and the Steel Belt of America were left to rust. Call centres, dollar stores, and welfare payments propped up the local economy.
The capitalist class had won. Kalecki was turning in his grave.
You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party
George Carlin was once asked what he thought about freedom of choice, he responded: “[there are] two political parties, five big media companies, three or four oil companies, but there are 32 kinds of jelly bean … you know what your choice is in America, paper or plastic, cash or card … coke or pepsi”. In the 80s the shelves became flooded with hundreds of brands, an illusion of choice, masking the few companies which monopolised the market. Despite this, the choices in our consumption seem to define who we are — be it our Apple phones or Nike trainers — they are expression of a core values. This is especially true of the media.
Meet Rupert Murdoch.
In the beginning, there was one small newspaper. Rupert had inherited it from his father, and made it a financial success. Through the fifties and sixties, he built a sizable media empire, purchasing Australia’s Sunday Times, The Daily Mirror, and The Australian (and an assortment of provincial and suburban papers). Moving to the UK he would buy the News of the World and later The Sun. The Economist credits Murdoch with “inventing the modern tabloid”, this essentially meant an increased sports and scandal coverage, whilst employing attention-grabbing headlines to wild success. As he told the then editor of The Sun Larry Lamb: “I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it”.
Murdoch looked down upon all he had wrought, and saw that it was good.
However, Murdoch was completely rejected by the British establishment who considered him as sleezy and crude as the articles in his newspapers. To them he corrupted the venerated tradition of journalism. He saw things differently, he saw a chattering class who for years had lectured and bored the public, he offered them exactly what they wanted.
As keen a shark, the media mogul had noticed the trend towards eye-catching entertainment. In the US, beginning in seventies the advent of cable television provided the average viewer with a cacophony of options. Like the tabloids Murdoch had pioneered, TV offered channels dedicated to sport, drama, or scandal. In the past everyone watched the news, there was little alternative. It served as a stable centre in the political landscape. Now fewer people began tuning in. Those who remained were amongst the most politically minded. A self-perpetuating cycle began, news broadcasters chased a decreasing viewership with increasingly partisan coverage. In turn they became more likely to segregate to their preferred channel. It wasn’t Fox News or the Daily Mail which polarised the public, but HBO and Sky Sports. The moderating voice in media and the elections evaporated. The Great Escape had begun.
In many ways Murdoch was a poster-boy for Kalecki’s predictions, advocating for free markets and globalised trade. It was little wonder he found himself a prominent supporter of both Thatcher and Reagan.
Murdoch would move to America, taking citizenship in order to buy 20th Century Fox (he would also acquire the New York Post). Rumour spread he was up to eyes in debt. Using money from American bankers, Murdoch aimed to squeeze more profit from his existing properties by automating the printing process. The print unions were up in arms upon hearing the news. A long and violent struggle ensued, mirroring the miner’s strike as little as two years before.
Thatcher would help break the print unions, in return he pledged his continual support. When Murdoch went to buy The Times of London monopoly laws would be waved in his favour. The two conducted a secret lunch at Chequer’s to discuss their plans. Maggie, the apostle of competition, would help set up the media biggest cartel in UK history.
Journalist Woodrow Wyatt (aka “Rupert’s Fixer”) was the middleman for the two titans. He would learn a savage lesson: like the market, Murdoch had no allegiance. Wyatt had told Murdoch everything about the inner workings of the British establishment, he had given himself totally to him. But in 1995 Murdoch would support the Labour party’s Tony Blair. Once again, the old shark smelled blood in the water.
Wyatt would spill all “He doesn’t seem to value what I did for him. I had all the rules bent for him over … the Times.”. Murdoch was “a coward. He’ll never tell you anything unpleasant to your face.”
It mattered little. The ideology of Hayek had trickled down into the heart of the establishment. When Thatcher was asked her greatest achievement, the answer was easy “New Labour”.
In 1991 the Soviet Union would finally fall. Reagan and Thatcher’s war against evil was over. China would begin opening up to the world. The West had won.
Murdoch would establish Fox News in 1996, already the landscape had changed. The free market laisse faire economics of the New Right would be assimilated with the social justice of the New Left. The internationalism of both providing the glue. A queer Jekyll and Hyde ideology was concocted. The arguments were over. A slick generation of PR politicians more concerned with soundbites than speeches took the stage. First Clinton and then Blair proclaimed to be part of the “Third Way”. Capitalism with a human face.
As Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed:
“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
Like the end of a movie, capitalism would ride off into the sunset.
Roll the credits.
Fin.
But the story is never over. Out in the hinterland, whole towns and cities were left to rot. Bereft of the manufacturing jobs which had defined them and alienated by a culture in rapid flux, resentment would grow. The silent and forgotten would find their voice, politics would never be the same again.
