To get Past our Poisonous Political Polarization, We Need a New “Grand Bargain” in America between Labor, Business, and Government
We’ve done it before. We can and must do it again.
A lot of the problems we have right now with the very fast rise of a relatively militant, hard-right populist movement, is the fact that “Making It” in America, which is pretty much everyone’s primary concern and focus, has become virtually impossible for so many Americans. This has to change, and quickly.
It’s never been very easy to make it in America absent being born into wealth.
But after a couple of centuries of often ruthless combat between workers and owners (industrialists, et al., and far more often than not backed by state and federal governments), the Great Depression propelled government to finally stepped-in to help regular people “make it.” And then, in the aftermath of WWII, a “grand bargain” was struck, and organized labor was largely accepted as a collaborator in facilitating overall stability and growth.
Labor, industry, and government finally found grounds to provide working and middle-class Americans relatively sound, reliable pathways to “making it” in America.
America and millions of Americans prospered.
Then came the ‘70’s through now, where tens of millions of Americans who got on these paths and thought they had “made it” — or that they were doing all the right things to “make it” — have had the ground beneath them ripped away by Trickle-Down Reaganomics and Neo-liberal Globalism.
In this 40-50 year period, the capacity to “make it,” or to “keep it,” was stripped away: factory closing, by bank home foreclosure, by car repossession, by a defunded “commons,” by overdose, and by [ . . . you name it] at a time.
America as the opportunity society for regular and “Heartland” Americans did not simply crumble or slip away. It was actively destroyed by the ground-shattering indifference and negligence of a bipartisan policy consensus.
And so, here we are.
Tens of millions of Americans feel betrayed and abandoned by both parties and are now aligned with what is essentially a new party: The [Republican] Party of Trump. And that party Trump makes pretty much one overriding promise:
You and I will not be treated unfairly anymore. We will not be suckered and exploited by the Deep State, faceless bureaucrats, educated elites, vengeful prosecutors, crazy judges, or the freeloaders of NATO.
We have been stripped of and denied our rights, our fair share of America’s opportunities — while others, mainly black and brown people, but increasingly so many other categories of self-identified “special” people — have been given preferential and special treatment. We’re done with this. And we absolutely will not allow a flood of millions of ”illegals” from all over the world to be added to the “special status” list.
Notice how all of this gets connected directly to our nation’s ongoing racial issues.
Bottom line
Our nation’s immigration/border problems, and their centrality to the authoritarian agenda, cannot be addressed absent an urgent and robust reconstruction of a “grand bargain” like the one that was struck after WWII among labor, business, and government.
The Biden Administration has managed to make a good start at this on the ground through some major legislative packages. These investments will likely produce strong results in growing prosperity and opportunity in the heartland and elsewhere for years to come. And these can be built upon.
But what is still desperately missing is an authentic and powerful “supra-partisan” way forward to address this and other major issues. The creation of a new “Grand Bargain” among labor, business, and government can do this. It could bring together these major pillars of American growth and success around policies and practices that substantively enable all Americans the opportunity to “make it.”
The foundation upon which America has been built has been the unique and unprecedented promise that you can come from any background or circumstance and have a fair shot at “making it.”
America cannot hope to prosper going forward without fulfilling this promise.