This book by a new author is a treatise on the significance of the New Deal---a topic right up my alley. Was the New Deal sui generis?
Where does the New Deal fit in the big picture of American history? What does it mean for us today? What happened to the economic equality it once engendered? In The Great Exception, Jefferson Cowie provides new answers to these important questions. In the period between the Great Depression and the 1970s, he argues, the United States government achieved a unique level of equality, using its considerable resources on behalf of working Americans in ways that it had not before and has not since. If there is to be a comparable battle for collective economic rights today, Cowie argues, it needs to build on an understanding of the unique political foundation for the New Deal. Anyone who wants to come to terms with the politics of inequality in the United States will need to read The Great Exception. (From Amazon)
"My argument can be stated boldly and succinctly: the political era between the 1930's and the 1970's marks what might be called a great exception---a sustained deviation, an extended detour---from some of the main contours of American political practice, economic structure, and cultural outlook. During this period, the central government used its considerable resources in a systematic, if hardly consistent, fashion on behalf of the interest of nonelite Americans in ways that it had not one before or since. The depth of the depression
Reconstruction failed when the freedmen were denied land. P. 45
"The ugly truth about the United States in the 1930's was that without Southern white votes, nothing was going to happen with the Democratic Party, and not challenging Jim Crow was the only path to Southern white votes." P. 124
Southern and Northern Democrats created the New Deal, but at the price of excluding the primary job sources of blacks---agriculture and domestic. P. 126
The New Deal began the process of driving the Negro vote to the Democratic Party even as the New Deal discriminate against blacks. P. 128
The book really plays up the whiteness of the New Deal. P. 130
The book makes clear the power of the onset of war to end the depression. P. 142
The New Deal was the foundation for the greatest age of equality in the United States since the onset of the industrial revolution. P. 151
On this Sunday morning (1/8) I'm thinking that the real Camelot was not JFK's time but the time of The New Deal.
The Reagan Revolution is more accurately described as the The Reagan Restoration, restoring the country to the individualist way it was before The New Deal. A more stratified and divided people Culturally more conservative. Certainly more racist. The inherent fragility of the New Deal contributed. Not smaller government, but the questions of to which issues the powers of government were to be directed. P. 206
The era of big government is not over, but the New Deal is over. P. 209
The new Gilded Age is stronger than the hope of any New Deal. The corporate economic powers that be have insulated themselves from the rest of us. The return of 19th Century plutocracy, crony capitalism, and amazing levels of inequality give us an impregnable ruling class. The politics of shared economic security is defeated by racism, phony cultural divisions, and trumped up immigrant hostility. P. 210
Cultural values and tensions are real, but economic insecurity and repression should be greater. Did Obama make a mistake in his first two years in not making a clean break from the past to present a positive case the government directly addressing economic insecurity for the poor and the middle class? P. 211
"The broad historical canvas of American politics might be imagined as a bright burst of experimentation set against a background of enduring themes of moral reform and corporate power." P. 227
The strongest political commitments come from clear historical analysis. There is more hope in historical clarity than in chasing ghosts. P. 229
The raucous view from a Buick Six continues. P. 233
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