A New Look at the Left Wing

nosex:

Let me make it clear at the outset. I too believe in American exceptionalism, although I don’t think God has anything to do with it. But I suspect my perspective will find little favor among Republicans in general and Tea Party members in particular. For I believe that America is exceptional in the advantages we’ve had over other nations, not what we’ve done with those advantages.

Indeed, to me there are two American exceptionalisms. One is the exceptionally favorable circumstances the United States found itself in at its founding and over its first 200 years. The second is the exceptional way in which we have squandered those advantages, in the process creating a value system singularly antagonistic to the changes needed when those advantages disappeared.

One aspect of “American exceptionalism” was always economic.  US workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that afforded their families a rising standard of living.  Ever harder work paid off in rising consumption.  The rich got richer faster than the rest, but almost no one got poorer.  Nearly all citizens felt “middle class.”  A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of labor supply.  So it kept raising wages to attract waves of immigration and to retain employees across the 19th century until the 1970s.

Then everything changed.  Real wages stopped rising as US capitalists redirected their investments to produce and employ abroad while replacing millions of workers in the US by computers.  Women’s liberation moved millions of adult US women to seek paid employment.  US capitalism no longer faced a shortage of labor.

US employers took advantage of the changed situation: they stopped raising wages.  When basic labor scarcity became labor excess, not only real wages but eventually benefits too stopped rising.  Over the last 30 years, the vast majority of US workers have in fact gotten poorer when you sum up flat real wages, reduced benefits (pensions, medical insurance, etc.), reduced public services, and raised tax burdens.  In economic terms, American “exceptionalism” began to die in the 1970s.