Are We Already Doomed?
The authoritarian seeds were planted in the 1980s. They are coming to fruition now.
MSNBC host Alex Wagner opened her show Thursday night with a point that made my blood freeze: that Project 2025 isn’t the first time Republicans have planned to install loyalists in every level of government.
It was already done in the 1980s. And, chillingly, the seed that was planted then is blooming now.
As regular readers know, I have been thinking, and writing, about the 1980s for some time. But mostly in terms of economics.
Reaganomics, or neoliberalism, was the belief that if you lowered taxes on rich people, they would invest in their businesses and the economy, and that investment would trickle down to the the rest of us.
We know that didn’t work. (Again, I will refer you to Robert Reich’s Wealth and Poverty class for a cogent and entertaining explanation.)
Because it really wasn’t just about freeing up money to invest in businesses. It was about exalting the shareholder over the customers, the workers, and the community in which the businesses operated.
That focus on “shareholder value” created an environment in which businesses were intentionally dismantled and sold for parts. It created an environment in which “economies of scale” gave rise to the “efficiency” of the mega corporation.
Main Streets in countless American cities died as Walmarts and Home Depots moved in with lower prices, and even lower wages.
Economic inequality soared.
Shareholders, ever eager for more money, created financial instruments that almost brought down the entire economy in 2008, killing more small businesses, and throwing millions of people out of their homes.
Because Republican presidents lowered taxes for rich people, and increased spending while simultaneously dissing government spending, federal debt has skyrocketed. And now the architects of Project 2025 want to blame the victims.
Surprisingly, President Biden is fighting back, with record government investment, a flourishing economy, a real attempt to turn back climate change, and a rise in worker pay with strong unions. He is trying to rebuild the middle class.
A new Harris poll, though, shows that 56% of people in the U.S. have economic perceptions that are simply erroneous, as the Guardian points out.
To be clear, we are not in a recession. The stock market is higher than it has EVER been. And unemployment is lower than it has been in 60 years.
But, according the Harris poll, more than half the people in the country think the exact opposite is true.
Too many Americans are responding to obfuscation that has been laid in front of them. They see a screwed up country but can’t see the intentional long game that has gotten us here. And they blame the guy who is trying to turn things around.
NBC News reports that people who consume mainstream news understand the sea change that is happening under the Biden Administration. People who get their news from partisan sources - or don’t pay attention at all to politics (and probably are not aware that that random cute guy on TikTok is actually talking about politics) - do not have a firm grip on the reality of what is happening in our economy.
This reporting, plus Wagner’s show opening on Thursday, has made me wonder if what Biden is doing is too little, too late.
We have already created the world in which ignorance thrives. That all stems from the 1980s.
The Brain Trust
Both Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito worked in high levels in the Reagan White House - Roberts as Associate White House Counsel (with his now chief critic, J. Michael Luttig), and Alito as Assistant Solicitor General. Justice Clarence Thomas was appointed by Reagan to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ann Gorsuch - mother of Justice Neil Gorsuch - was appointed director of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Both Thomas and Ann Gorsuch opposed the missions of the agencies they were chosen to lead. That was the point. They were supposed to gut them from the inside.
Hold my beer for a second, though. We can’t forget Brett Kavanaugh, who worked for the White House Counsel’s Office under George W. Bush, and has supported both the heightened power of the executive branch and the limitation of administrative agencies - like the ones Thomas and Gorsuch were supposed to dismantle from the inside.
This, of course, brings us to Project 2025, which is the blueprint for dismantling the administrative state.
Project 2025 is published by the Heritage Foundation - which we now know is a huge benefactor of Justices Thomas and Alito. The 900-page document contains contributions from some of the country’s most illustrious bigots - who reference the “global elites” (meaning Jews) and “drug abuse ravaging low income communities” (meaning Black people). The blueprint calls for the immediate elimination of public education, and the anti-poverty programs like school lunches that go along with public education in America.
It will also get rid of the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the IRS, among other agencies. Good luck getting your refund.
It will put restrictions on Medicare and Medicaid based on the “household structure” of the people applying. That means, if you are a family with two moms or two dads, you may not qualify for healthcare. If you are a family headed by one single mother, you may not qualify for healthcare. If one of your children is trans, you definitely will not qualify for healthcare.
I am not exaggerating. We are heading into a dystopia that Hollywood has not been able to imagine. It will not be due to a flood that will wipe out whole cities in a moment. It will be more insidious, slowly targeting individuals, who will accept the limits on their lives as new norms, much as they have already swallowed the message written in the 1980s that individual self-interest is better than the common good.
We have been primed to be the executioners of our own doom.
The Supreme Court - with it’s Reagan/Bush majority - effectively ruled this week that racial gerrymandering is legal. They effectively ruled that the 14th Amendment is moot. Because, for Alito, being called a racist is literally worse than being racist.
I wish I could say that all the college students who camped out in all the quads came back after this ruling, protesting how the U.S. was going back to Jim Crow.
They didn’t.
I wish I could say that all my Jewish friends and family are posting vicious memes attacking Justice Alito and the racism that has infected the Supreme Court.
They are not.
We all learned too well in the last four decades that in the U.S., you don’t stand up for each other. Just your own.
That’s what Reagan taught us.
The Ticket Masters
But this week also saw a bit of a pushback from the government that currently is in power.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a Justice Department lawsuit over the monopolistic, anti-competitive practices of Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster.
Still, the ‘80s linger.
As the AP reported - and my memories serve - complaints by artists about the anti-competitive practices of Ticketmaster have been going on since the early ‘90s, when Pearl Jam asked the Justice Department to look into the price gouging of their fans.
How quaint! A group that actually cares about their customers.
The Department of Justice under Bill Clinton, though, didn’t do anything about Ticketmaster or any of the other ticket sellers who were seemingly colluding in their price gouging and fees. Then, in 2011, under the Obama Administration, the last two ticket selling giants - Live Nation and Ticketmaster - merged, creating a behemoth that controls more than 70% of the market.
On top of that, as Garland asserted this week, Live Nation owns many of the venues where Ticketmaster is the exclusive seller.
That’s one of the more clear violations in the rusty antitrust statute that has been laying dormant for the last four decades.
Why, I asked in 2011, did the Obama Administration let this merger happen? Why, I asked in the 1990s, did the Clinton Administration let these anti-competitive practices happen? These were Democratic presidents. Their embrace of Reagan’s diminishment of government as a force for good, his union busting, and definition of free market as something that only exists to make rich men richer is what normalized all the changes that were put in place in the ‘80s.
Hell, Obama wouldn’t even fight to fully fund a recovery from the recession, leaving a morose economy to spark anger and despair in people. The reason the economy is as good as it is now is because we all got checks that kept us afloat during the pandemic. We all got unemployment benefits of $1,000 a week.
Our government spent money to help us make it through. Because we are so used to being beaten up rather than helped, many of us are ignorant even of that.
Reagan did that. With ample help from Democrats.
The Boiling Lobster
The Reagan ‘80s, and the Clinton ‘90s, also saw the rise of private equity firms. I call them “vulture capitalists.” Private equity doesn’t care about the underlying fundamentals and longterm viability of a company. It cares about big, short-term gains.
When a private equity firm buys a struggling business, it takes out a huge loan against the business, saddling it with debt until the business goes belly up. The private equity firm then sells the business for parts.
That’s what happened to ToysRUs. It’s what happened to the Denver Post and many other newspapers. And it’s what happened this week, to Red Lobster.
But, as Fast Company notes, Red Lobster’s demise came with a fishy smell.
Golden Gate Capital bought Red Lobster in 2014. It then saddled the company with debt financing. But it also sold the land that every store sat on - and then leased it back to the stores for higher than market rates.
Then it sold Red Lobster to a seafood supply company called Thai Union, which had never run a restaurant, much less a restaurant chain. Thai Union was one of Red Lobster’s shrimp suppliers. Thai Union, according to CNN, got rid of the other shrimp suppliers, then jacked up the wholesale price of the shrimp it sold to the company it owned!
Many people in this country think this is just how things work. No. This is how people who worked in the Reagan Administration wanted things to work.
Before that, people invested in companies so they would thrive, not die.
Killing the Messengers
The 1980s is also when media companies began to consolidate. As former journalist Chris Daly writes in his book, “Covering America,” big media companies started merging in 1985. Now, we have just a handful of global conglomerates controlling all of the entertainment and news we consume.
More importantly, since Reaganomics dictated that the only value was shareholder value, the news divisions of the big three networks (cable wasn’t a thing in the U.S. yet) were told they needed to turn a profit so the stock would go higher. In the past, news divisions were considered a loss leader. For the sake of democracy, we needed independent news organizations.
That was in the days when money wasn’t the only value our leaders cared about.
It was in 1987 that the FCC rescinded the fairness doctrine. The fairness doctrine mandated that a media company had to air or publish a variety of views. After it was abolished, Reagan vetoed a bill that Congress passed to codify it into law.
This opened the door for media companies to only air or publish one view.
Or lie.
Soon after that, we got Rush Limbaugh. Then we got Fox News.
From Fox News we got social media, which is totally unregulated. Then we got a billionaire buying the second largest social media platform in the world and not only allowing misinformation to flow, but sharing misinformation himself.
And now we have 56% of Americans thinking that we are in a recession and that the stock market is down when the exact opposite is true. We also have - if you believe the last NY Times/Sienna poll - almost 20% of respondents blaming Biden for making abortion illegal. Because it happened under his watch.
Reagan did that.
So did the Bushes.
So did Clinton.
So did Obama.
So did all of us. We accepted that this was the way the world worked. We, as journalists, refused to put stories in context. We as citizens lost ourselves to the self-interest Reaganomics preached and gave up any hope of imagining the world as it could be.
And now - this week, anyway - I am afraid that the seeds planted by the zealots of the 1980s will overtake our entire garden of democracy.
We think the 2024 is an election about whether or not to keep our democratic system. To the extent that people don’t understand that, I think we may already have lost it.
If you’ve gotten to the end of this cheery missive, you will enjoy my equally serious, but usually more upbeat, weekly columns. Please subscribe or upgrade your subscription to paid.
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I still have hope! Progress is happening under the Biden administration, and we have an opportunity to keep that going another four years. I’m with my fellow millennials in being angry about what happened in the 80s and 90s, but I’m confident we can turn it around. The media might be an ever-worsening mess, but there are a lot of great people on the ground doing the work to get our politics back on track. 💪