My god, what a boring stuffy article that didn't even attempt to link some relevance to the modern age. Maybe I've got a short attention span and need things to be spelled out to me lately, but my skim of that story read like some dry textbook. I basically forgot every word except "Grange" as soon as I closed the tab...
This is a review of the book "Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896" by Charles Postel.
The 'Gilded Age' of America mentioned in the submission title is this period of 1886-1896.
The whole review is a bit belaboured, or perhaps bogged down in detail, but tries to show how an analysis of this period can be used to understand the concept of equality today. The book apparently examines a number of different organisations that were founded in this time, such as the Grange, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Knights of Labor. The claim is that these organisations were, at least in part, founded to try remove inequality but ended up leading to greater inequality.
> the national orientation of [these groups] led them to embrace a “white nationalist framework of sectional reconciliation.” The struggle against slavery cast a long shadow over the Gilded Age. The era’s radicals often viewed it as a model for their own activism. Yet because of their desire to organize nationally and to recruit members regardless of their Civil War loyalties, these groups played an important role in disseminating a view of that conflict in which slavery played only a minor part and Reconstruction was considered a disastrous mistake. This had dire consequences for black Americans and for an ideal of equality that transcended racial difference.
Their summary probably gets their point across most succinctly:
> Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, the presidential campaigns of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty, and more generally the dysfunctionality of contemporary capitalism, equality—or the widespread lack thereof—again occupies a prominent place in political debate. Beyond the fate of the individual organizations it covers, Equality reminds us of a homegrown radical heritage that critics of today’s deeply unequal America can be inspired by and must improve upon. The ideal of equality remains as radical as it was in Jefferson’s day. But equality limited to some is not equality.
I'm perplexed by writers who prioritize the social equality of a minority over economic equality among the majority.
Don't get me wrong - I think both are important, but if we're honest, doesn't the general peace and well-being of society (from which better conditions for the minority tend to spring) depend more on the latter? You can't solve these problems easily in reverse order; the disgruntled majority will get tired of hearing about minority issues while they struggle to put food on the table.
This is a bit of a false dichotomy, but as a continuous balance of focus between the two issues, I think the point stands.
It’s harder to scapegoat minorities when nobody’s all that mad about anything. Conversely, it’s easier to be charitable when you have more to give. Finally, there’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: self and family survival comes before everything else.
If you have counterexamples to this theorizing of mine, I’d love to see them!
Well, you could a look at the antebellum south of the US, to start. Don't think much more needs to be said about that...
Or you could look at the contemporary US. We have basically no unemployment, enormous wealth, no war on our land in over a century and a half, we're probably the most prosperous and least attacked people in history, and yet we see quite a lot of majority-minority strife.
You could also look at the article or the book it's talking about, which is also talking about a period where your theorizing didn't hold up.
Maybe let's flip it, do you have examples of peaceful high-well-being societies where people who were different from most people in the society were equivalent participants in that well being?
>Well, you could a look at the antebellum south of the US, to start. Don't think much more needs to be said about that...
The abolitionist movement was huge in the North, where economic equality was better [0]. The antebellum South was a great example of a deeply unequal society, where poor whites were easily pitted against blacks. (Still haven't solved this problem)
>Or you could look at the contemporary US. We have basically no unemployment, enormous wealth, no war on our land
Huge wealth inequality. Student debt crisis. Opioid crisis. Healthcare. Good jobs gone, replaced with bad jobs. Labor participation rate hasn’t recovered since the Great Recession.
>Maybe let's flip it, do you have examples of peaceful high-well-being societies where people who were different from most people in the society were equivalent participants in that well being?
Sure, though I did only say better, not "equivalent": we can look at Jews who prospered in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth [1][2], or Jews in England during the Victorian Era [3]. As contrasted with Jews in Western Europe during the Dark Ages -- _lots_ of pogroms and expulsions -- or Jews in Weimar Germany, or Jews in Tsarist Russia.
I'm ... no longer sure what your point is, but just one reply to note that you can't put responsibility for slaves on plantations onto "poor whites" who "were easily pitted against blacks". They were rich people who enslaved others just because they thought they were superior and could get away with it. No economic solution was going to solve that.
I would propose The most fundamental issue US needs to solve for inequality in the US is....whether US can continue to allow corporations to reap the benefits of a strong democracy coupled with the most vibrant economy, while at the same time, bankrupt the communities by continuing to ship jobs overseas and avoid paying any sort of taxes back to the communities where they make a profit.
There are only two parties in the US right now. And one is for globalization. And the other is for stronger US labor unions, as mentioned in the article.
Neither party is for stronger US labor unions. Both parties are pro-globalism and pro-free trade.
It was under a democratic president that China attained Most Favored Trading Nation status. It was Clinton, in the 90s, who did most of the legwork to get China into the WTO - though they officially entered under Bush's term in 2001.
> Both parties are pro-globalism and pro-free trade.
Well a recent president tried to stop US workers competing with an underclass of illegal residents with a border wall and tried to help the competitiveness of US workers with increased tariffs on a large nation with much cheaper labor. For some reason those actions are unpopular with people that consider themselves left wing.
The Democratic Party believes that when workers are strong, America is strong. Democrats will make it easier for workers, public and private, to exercise their right to organize and join unions. We will fight to pass laws that direct the National Labor Relations Board to certify a union if a simple majority of eligible workers sign valid authorization cards, as well as laws that bring companies to the negotiating table. We support binding arbitration to help workers who have voted to join a union reach a first contract.
> It was under a democratic president [...]. It was Clinton, in the 90s, [...].
Yeah, it was both those things. But was is about the past, not the present. The Democratic Party— and the Republican Party, too—has shifted since then (and particularly since the Great Recession). The Democrats have seen the pro-labor progressive faction that had been marginalized since
Clinton (and somewhat even earlier) by the neoliberal faction resurgent, while the Republicans have xenophobic mercantilist protectionists come to the forefront. The neoliberal consensus that peaked around the 1990s is well and truly dead; it may have supporters in bot parties, but they aren't dominant in either. No one is campaigning on free trade any more, and candidates are more likely to be disavowing their past support for free trade deals than endorsing current efforts.
> The Republicans used to be quite working-class oriented.
When exactly? Because thinking back through the history of the party from it's emergence, I can't see any time when I would say that, without some strong geographic, racial/ethnic, or other caveats. Their current status as the party of white working-class resentment is probably the most working-class they've ever been, unless you consider the original anti-slavery focus as a focus on the plight of a particular segment of the working class.
> Weird, I never thought of the Republicans as being pro-Union.
And they aren't. The current crop of Democrats mostly is, even with the continued strength of the pro-globalization factions of the party (which include a substantial faction that is basically neoliberal, but many members of which acknowledge some harms of neoliberal capitalism and see unions as a local mitigation for those harms.)
21 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] threadThe 'Gilded Age' of America mentioned in the submission title is this period of 1886-1896.
The whole review is a bit belaboured, or perhaps bogged down in detail, but tries to show how an analysis of this period can be used to understand the concept of equality today. The book apparently examines a number of different organisations that were founded in this time, such as the Grange, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Knights of Labor. The claim is that these organisations were, at least in part, founded to try remove inequality but ended up leading to greater inequality.
> the national orientation of [these groups] led them to embrace a “white nationalist framework of sectional reconciliation.” The struggle against slavery cast a long shadow over the Gilded Age. The era’s radicals often viewed it as a model for their own activism. Yet because of their desire to organize nationally and to recruit members regardless of their Civil War loyalties, these groups played an important role in disseminating a view of that conflict in which slavery played only a minor part and Reconstruction was considered a disastrous mistake. This had dire consequences for black Americans and for an ideal of equality that transcended racial difference.
Their summary probably gets their point across most succinctly:
> Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, the presidential campaigns of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty, and more generally the dysfunctionality of contemporary capitalism, equality—or the widespread lack thereof—again occupies a prominent place in political debate. Beyond the fate of the individual organizations it covers, Equality reminds us of a homegrown radical heritage that critics of today’s deeply unequal America can be inspired by and must improve upon. The ideal of equality remains as radical as it was in Jefferson’s day. But equality limited to some is not equality.
Don't get me wrong - I think both are important, but if we're honest, doesn't the general peace and well-being of society (from which better conditions for the minority tend to spring) depend more on the latter? You can't solve these problems easily in reverse order; the disgruntled majority will get tired of hearing about minority issues while they struggle to put food on the table.
This is a bit of a false dichotomy, but as a continuous balance of focus between the two issues, I think the point stands.
This parenthetical is doing a lot of the work in your argument, and alas, it is not always (or even usually) how things work.
If you have counterexamples to this theorizing of mine, I’d love to see them!
Or you could look at the contemporary US. We have basically no unemployment, enormous wealth, no war on our land in over a century and a half, we're probably the most prosperous and least attacked people in history, and yet we see quite a lot of majority-minority strife.
You could also look at the article or the book it's talking about, which is also talking about a period where your theorizing didn't hold up.
Maybe let's flip it, do you have examples of peaceful high-well-being societies where people who were different from most people in the society were equivalent participants in that well being?
The abolitionist movement was huge in the North, where economic equality was better [0]. The antebellum South was a great example of a deeply unequal society, where poor whites were easily pitted against blacks. (Still haven't solved this problem)
>Or you could look at the contemporary US. We have basically no unemployment, enormous wealth, no war on our land
Huge wealth inequality. Student debt crisis. Opioid crisis. Healthcare. Good jobs gone, replaced with bad jobs. Labor participation rate hasn’t recovered since the Great Recession.
>Maybe let's flip it, do you have examples of peaceful high-well-being societies where people who were different from most people in the society were equivalent participants in that well being?
Sure, though I did only say better, not "equivalent": we can look at Jews who prospered in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth [1][2], or Jews in England during the Victorian Era [3]. As contrasted with Jews in Western Europe during the Dark Ages -- _lots_ of pogroms and expulsions -- or Jews in Weimar Germany, or Jews in Tsarist Russia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antebellum_South#Wealth_inequa...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland#...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_England...
There are only two parties in the US right now. And one is for globalization. And the other is for stronger US labor unions, as mentioned in the article.
It was under a democratic president that China attained Most Favored Trading Nation status. It was Clinton, in the 90s, who did most of the legwork to get China into the WTO - though they officially entered under Bush's term in 2001.
Well a recent president tried to stop US workers competing with an underclass of illegal residents with a border wall and tried to help the competitiveness of US workers with increased tariffs on a large nation with much cheaper labor. For some reason those actions are unpopular with people that consider themselves left wing.
The Democratic Party believes that when workers are strong, America is strong. Democrats will make it easier for workers, public and private, to exercise their right to organize and join unions. We will fight to pass laws that direct the National Labor Relations Board to certify a union if a simple majority of eligible workers sign valid authorization cards, as well as laws that bring companies to the negotiating table. We support binding arbitration to help workers who have voted to join a union reach a first contract.
https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/raise-in...
> It was under a democratic president [...]. It was Clinton, in the 90s, [...].
Yeah, it was both those things. But was is about the past, not the present. The Democratic Party— and the Republican Party, too—has shifted since then (and particularly since the Great Recession). The Democrats have seen the pro-labor progressive faction that had been marginalized since Clinton (and somewhat even earlier) by the neoliberal faction resurgent, while the Republicans have xenophobic mercantilist protectionists come to the forefront. The neoliberal consensus that peaked around the 1990s is well and truly dead; it may have supporters in bot parties, but they aren't dominant in either. No one is campaigning on free trade any more, and candidates are more likely to be disavowing their past support for free trade deals than endorsing current efforts.
Weird, I never thought of the Republicans as being pro-Union.
When exactly? Because thinking back through the history of the party from it's emergence, I can't see any time when I would say that, without some strong geographic, racial/ethnic, or other caveats. Their current status as the party of white working-class resentment is probably the most working-class they've ever been, unless you consider the original anti-slavery focus as a focus on the plight of a particular segment of the working class.
They still are. Democrats are either globalists or Communists, neither of which represent anyone's interest other than powered elites.
And they aren't. The current crop of Democrats mostly is, even with the continued strength of the pro-globalization factions of the party (which include a substantial faction that is basically neoliberal, but many members of which acknowledge some harms of neoliberal capitalism and see unions as a local mitigation for those harms.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4daIk8PCPIc&feature=youtu.be
https://youtu.be/4daIk8PCPIc?t=850