In 1981, I was in the second year of my first round of college, and I worked for the campus newspaper. That was a bigger deal than it sounds. The Kentucky Kernel wasn’t just a token weekly, filled with fluff; it was the fourth-largest daily paper in the state, and included not only features and sports, but actual news and editorial content.
And, just as Ronald Reagan was taking his oath of office, I was promoted to editorial editor of the Kernel.
And once he’d gotten over being shot, Reagan began to roll out what in hindsight was an overt neoliberal agenda.
As editorial editor of a daily on the campus of a huge university, I had the benefit of hundreds of experts at my beck and call. When the new president started touting “trickle-down” as a solution to the national economy’s burps and bumps, I was able to immediately begin debunking it. Not that my pontifications made any difference.
The neoliberal agenda is vast, but its central tenets are easily summarized:
The US government is your enemy;
The government needs to get out of the business of helping Americans;
The well-being of business transcends the national interest;
Deregulate, deregulate, deregulate!
Ronald Reagan was a neoliberal juggernaut on all these fronts, setting the tone and strategy for all in the GOP who would follow him.
His assaults on the democratic order weren’t just systematic and persistent; they were overt, out in the open, often paraded on national television.
“Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he declared, followed later by, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” – casually vilifying, at a stroke, the hundreds of thousands who do enter public service out of a deep desire and conviction to help others and contribute to the betterment of the nation.
Reagan’s demonization of government, already a GOP staple, was perhaps the least of it; his valentine to capitalism, a gutting of tax policy that had been in place since World War II, requiring businesses and the very wealthy to contribute their fair share back to the economy that had enriched them, exploded the national debt. In cutting the top tax rate from 70% to 25%, he tripled it, from $738 billion to $2.4 trillion. That quickly, the US went from being the world’s largest creditor to the world’s largest debtor.
The justification was that the US economy wasn’t functioning properly, but that wasn’t true at all. The economy had boomed steadily during the post-World War II years, with only the normal fluctuations. The number of people in the US living in poverty had continually declined, even as the overall population rose.
In the process, Reagan and his allies laid track for the GOP to come by dissembling in the media to justify his agenda. His budget director, David Stockman, perpetuated the trickle-down gospel that cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy would trigger large returns as the savings would be re-invested in the economy, in effect paying for the cuts. The Office of Management and Budget debunked this myth with actual analysis, prompting Stockman to confess publicly that “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers... the whole thing is premised on faith, on a belief about how the world works.”
‘Trickle-down’ wasn’t real economic theory; it was conservative ideology. And when Stockman later said publicly that the tax cuts really were, in fact, a valentine to business, calling the whole thing a ‘Trojan horse’, he was castigated by the president.
Forty years later, ‘trickle-down’ has yet to function as promised, even though the current crop of GOP politicians continue to shop it; the money the uber-wealthy are saving on their tax bills isn’t and never has been re-invested in the economy. It sits in off-shore accounts.
A firestorm of deregulation followed the tax cuts, stagnating the prosperity of the middle class as the growth of the minimum wage dropped away and economic inequality surged. The push for privatization of government began in earnest, sending healthcare costs into the stratosphere, and barriers to the exporting of US manufacturing to nations where labor was far cheaper evaporated. That exodus, gutting the domestic jobs market as it dismantled unions, was accompanied by a breathtaking surge in the trade deficit. Reagan inherited from Carter a deficit of only $13 billion; when he left office, it had soared to a mind-blowing $685 billion.
Perhaps most damning was the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. The policy that had protected the integrity of public information since the dawn of radio was dropped, enabling the wild-west, anything-goes parade of disinformation and outright deception that clogs up media today. The airwaves ceased to be conduits for news and became what they are today – ideology pipelines.
Neoliberalism was off and running. The global, regulation-free landscape for the cultivation of wealth envisioned by Friedman and his cohorts was finally taking shape. The transformation of the US government from the middle-class-building, consumer-protecting, civil-rights-promoting agency it had become since the New Deal into capitalism’s passive enabler was well underway.
So it is today. As stated above, my entire adult life has been spent watching this disintegration happen before my eyes, stripping my children of the opportunities I took for granted. Their path is much harder now, and my sadness over that would be difficult to overstate.
Looking back, knowing what I know today, I’d have shouted louder that the incoming emperor had no clothes. Reaganism was indeed a Trojan horse, and the forces it unleashed have ended or endangered many of the institutions I thought would last forever. Civil discourse in the conducting of the people’s business is long gone; inequality has surged; people no longer trust those they count on to protect them. Deceit has been normalized, the rule of law is precarious, and violence – even murder! – in pursuit of political ends is becoming acceptable on US soil. All so Elon Musk can go to Mars.
No one would have heard me – but I should have shouted louder.
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