Reagan blindsided us.
—Dewey Burton, Michigan blue collar “Reagan Democrat,” to author Jefferson Cowie
It’s difficult to overstate how much that Reagan-era propaganda about poverty hurt the country. It distorted our understanding of how to help low-income people, as well as our optimism that they could be helped, and it corroded the social contract that had prevailed since the New Deal. Ironically, as Reagan was ranting about the government doing too much for the poor, no one was talking about the real beneficiaries of public largess in those years: the wealthiest Americans. And I’m not just talking about his tax cuts.
Certainly, Reagan’s tax cuts did the most damage when it comes to dismantling the machinery of upward mobility. He slashed the top rate from 70 percent to 28 percent, and income inequality has soared ever since. If that top rate of 70 percent sounds high—and it does to those of us who came of age in the 1980s or 1990s—we should remember that at the end of World War II, the top marginal tax rate was 94 percent, and it stayed in the 90s under Republican Dwight Eisenhower. Kennedy slashed it to 70 percent. Those are the tax rates that powered the postwar boom—the expansion of public education and universities, highway construction and home ownership, government-funded research and development—that created what we think of as the American Dream.
Despite his reputation as a tax slasher, Reagan raised taxes three times and tripled the deficit during his eight years in office. Sadly, his working-class “Reagan Democrat” admirers don’t seem to remember that he raised payroll taxes for Social Security, Medicare, and disability programs. Those tax hikes hurt poor and middle-class Americans and shielded the wealthy, because people don’t have to pay those taxes past a certain upper-middle-class income level. It must be said that Reagan collaborated with Tip O’Neill on those payroll tax hikes in order to strengthen Social Security and Medicare. Even Reagan quickly realized he couldn’t touch the pillar of New Deal liberalism, Social Security, or the Great Society’s Medicare program, because those universal programs for senior citizens were hugely popular. He could only get away with slashing Great Society programs that benefited the poor.
Reagan began a destructive spiral of concentrating wealth in the hands of fewer people and deregulating business that culminated in the economic crash we’re still digging out of today. He even heralded it, by signing the banking deregulation act that waved the “Go” flag on the savings and loan scandal and foreshadowed the repeal of Depression-era Glass-Steagall banking regulations a decade later. Family savings rates began to decline in the Reagan years, while borrowing rates climbed. This is the period when it began to seem as though Big Capital, instead of paying workers higher wages, figured out how to make more money by lending them that cash to stay in the middle class. Under Reagan, income inequality began to grow, household savings dwindled, household debt correspondingly began to rise, and the clout of the financial industry exploded. This trend couldn’t continue with anything other than disaster as a result, yet few did anything to stop it.
For all that he helped the rich, Reagan became president with the votes of that working class bloc famously known as “Reagan Democrats”: my people. Ground zero for the phenomenon, according to pollsters, wasn’t my white ethnic New York homeland but Macomb County, Michigan, a working-class suburb near Detroit that was once known as the most loyal Democratic suburb in the country. Macomb voted 63 percent for JFK in 1960 but went 66 percent for Reagan in 1984.
Pollster Stanley Greenberg made a career out of explaining those Macomb County voters to puzzled Democrats. He concluded that “Reagan Democrats” no longer saw Democrats as champions of the working class. “Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives,” Greenberg wrote. They saw the government “as a black domain where whites cannot expect reasonable treatment.”
In fact, Macomb County had been moving right long before the Reagan landslide. A 1971 forced-busing plan that brought Detroit kids into Macomb provoked a backlash; 66 percent of the county’s Democratic voters supported George Wallace in the 1972 primary. Wallace carried the entire state of Michigan that day, the same day he was shot while campaigning in Wisconsin.
We’ll never know how much Wallace would have shaped Democratic politics if he’d continued his campaign, by the way. It’s a scary thought. The brave Michael Harrington actually talked of uniting a coalition of “the three Georges”—Meany, McGovern, and Wallace—but Harrington was most interested in the populist postshooting Wallace, who renounced his racist past yet still espoused a politics of the economically left behind. That’s what it would have taken to put the New Deal coalition back together.
But Harrington was a socialist and a dreamer. No such coalition was possible in his lifetime, and maybe not in mine.
• • •
It’s possible that Reagan’s greatest contribution to income inequality wasn’t his high-end tax cuts, but the way he took all of the air out of the labor movement when he fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981. It’s not that the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) was an enormous union, but it symbolized a problem for labor that Republicans recognized before Democrats did: as unions lost power in the private sector, their only gains were coming in the public sector, and this divided the working class even more, into labor haves and have-nots. Ironically, PATCO had been one of the few unions to endorse Reagan.
The collapse of the manufacturing sector took a lot of those union jobs. A corporate campaign of union busting and union decertification eroded organized labor’s private-sector strength even more. Labor leaders never had been terribly creative about organizing either the service sector or the growing ranks of white-collar workers, who, for a while at least, felt themselves superior to brawny union members, convinced that they were doing brainwork that required flexibility and that they would be rewarded by grateful employers.
The one place organized labor enjoyed continued success was in government. In the sixties and the seventies, the public sector was growing, and so were public sector unions—unions that tended to include more women and minorities, too. Gradually, the rise in public employee unions, combined with the diminishing of private sector unions, made “unions” just another symbol of government, as well as of the rising workforce power of women and minorities. (By 2010, black men were most likely to be represented by unions; 14.8 percent of black male workers were union members, compared with 12.5 percent of white men, 10 percent of Latino men, and 9.4 percent of Asian men.)
Eventually, as private-sector unions shrank, more Americans paid for their own health insurance benefits, and pensions became employee-funded 401(k)s, the dominance of public sector unions would almost seem a form of welfare state redistribution—in which my tax dollars are paying for your health insurance and pensions. In busting PATCO, Reagan relied on an early sense that working-class have-nots were coming to resent unionized working-class haves who relied on Big Government.
Yet even as he was posing as a free-market conservative, Reagan’s economic policy was anything but free market. Paul Volcker’s Fed helped bring on the 1982 recession by choking off the money supply, as a radical cure for inflation. It worked, but unemployment climbed from 7.5 percent to close to 10 percent by the 1982 midterms. After that, Volcker helped ease the recession by loosening the money supply again, and Reagan’s hike in defense spending became a hidden form of stimulus. The Reagan boom began. Few Democrats seemed to notice that the right-wing president they denounced for free-market cruelty to the poor and the working class had become a stealth military Keynesian.
• • •
I wasn’t long for Santa Barbara. After two years, I moved to Chicago (the future president wasn’t there yet) to work for the self-described “independent socialist newspaper” In These Times. I wasn’t sure that made me a socialist, but I admired founder James Weinstein’s commitment to tell the truth about his politics and to try to redeem the term. Far from being sectarian, the wry, rumpled, independently wealthy, radical pragmatist looked for signs of left-wing life anywhere there might be a glimmer of it: feminism, gay rights, environmentalism.
Yet deep down, Weinstein believed that unions and the Congressional Black Caucus were the only hopes for the institutional left, though he wasn’t terribly romantic about their chances of forming a majority anytime soon. Still, he persevered. I’d landed in a place that reinforced my father’s earliest political lessons: that the interests of black people and the working class didn’t have to be, and in fact should never be, in conflict. Weinstein also made me realize how unusual my political views were, given my background. At In These Times, people were always assuming I was a “red diaper baby” from some left-wing activist family, given my eccentric ideas and passions. No, I’d tell them, my father was a former Christian Brother with no left-wing affiliations, just Catholic values.
My stubborn belief in the possibility and power of a black-labor alliance seemed to be rewarded, right there and then in Chicago, by Harold Washington’s unbelievable mayoral campaign in 1983—which was the happiest political experience of my lifetime, at least until Obama’s election. Putting a blue Washington button on your coat and persevering through that bitter Chicago winter, you didn’t feel the cold. Elegant black women smiled at you on Michigan Avenue. Bus drivers held doors open, rather than pulling away. I didn’t venture very far beyond my shabby fringe of Lakeshore liberal territory, so I rarely witnessed the hatred Washington encountered. The Chicago that politically vanquished Dr. King hadn’t gone away with Mayor Daley’s demise.
When Washington won the primary, a stunning number of white Chicago Democrats, many of them Irish Catholics, abandoned their party to vote for Bernie Epton, who morphed from liberal Republican to George Wallace overnight. Remember those Sarah Palin rallies with people carrying monkeys named Obama and folks yelling “Kill him!” and “Terrorist!”? Epton rallies were like that, only more menacing. Walter Mondale went with Washington to a Catholic church on Easter Sunday, walking through a door spray-painted with the words “Nigger Die,” while throngs of protesters chanted “Blacks go home.” Mondale and Washington had to leave early for their safety. The vice president said later that it was one of the scariest political experiences of his life. I’ve never been so ashamed of my people.
Washington won, if way too narrowly in Democratic Chicago, and the Washington coalition—blacks, labor, progressive whites and Latinos, feminists, gay rights groups—seemed to herald the politics that would end Reaganism. It inspired Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition run for president the next year. He won 3.2 million votes—almost 20 percent of the total—and won primaries or caucuses in South Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and the District of Columbia.
Jackson’s campaign blew up for a while when he was caught referring to New York as “Hymietown,” and all of the old angst about black anti-Semitism tainted his candidacy and stunted his potential coalition. Still, his run made history, and he was the star of the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, in which he asked forgiveness for errors he’d made with the historic coda “God isn’t finished with me yet,” summoning a little bit of the moral majesty of the civil rights movement.
It was my first convention, so maybe I can be forgiven for thinking it represented a new start for Democrats, a healing of the wounds of the sixties and the seventies. Along with Jackson, the convention featured two other inspiring leaders, both of them white ethnic New Yorkers, veterans of the racial politics that had turned so many of their community into Reagan Democrats. There was Mario Cuomo of Queens, who’d come out of the ugly battle over low-income housing there. The next night featured the historic Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman on a national ticket. The new vice presidential nominee sounded Cuomo and Jackson’s themes of unity in her convention speech: “The daughter of an immigrant from Italy has been chosen to run for vice president in the new land my father came to love.”
Walter Mondale didn’t pick Ferraro merely for her female credentials alone; being a so-called white ethnic helped her too. She represented the fictional Archie Bunker’s district in Queens, that neighborhood nationally known for its bungalows and (to liberals) its backward views about race and the rapidly changing times. Mondale hoped she’d woo back those voters from the “Catholic sidewalks of New York” whom Kevin Phillips had lured to Nixon. The idea that an urban woman could lure back an increasingly suburban male working class seems silly now, but it passed for smart politics at the time.
Each night I stood in a multiracial crowd of activists and union members, some in tears, fervent Democrats thrilling to the words of reunion and redemption from Jackson, Cuomo, and Ferraro. The labor movement energy impressed me. I was there with a friend who was trying to reorganize air traffic controllers in the wake of Reagan crushing their union. It felt as if we were finally putting the Democratic Party back together again after 1968. Of course, Mondale would lose to Reagan more lopsidedly than Carter did, carrying only Minnesota and the District of Columbia. He had assembled the proto-Obama coalition, only about a quarter century too early.
It’s not that Mondale didn’t try to contest Reagan on economic grounds. He actually talked a lot about the need for a “national industrial policy,” to deal with the very real problems of manufacturing decline and working-class job losses. But it seemed wonky, bureaucratic, and unnecessary at a time when Reagan’s free-market boom seemed to validate his hands-off approach. Nobody paid much attention to the fact that Reagan’s boom was kicked off by stealth Keynesianism: Paul Volcker loosened up the money supply and ended the recession he’d helped induce by tightening it, and that cheaper money, combined with new defense spending, helped create jobs again. Unemployment fell from 9.5 to 7.2 percent by Election Day. That still wasn’t Morning in America for the unemployed, but it made Mondale’s talk about a troubled economy requiring government support seem like tired old liberalism. Why were Democrats trying to fix something that didn’t seem broken?
• • •
I was bewildered by Mondale’s crushing loss. What was I still missing about American politics? So I left journalism for a while and went to work for the California State Assembly Human Services Committee, the poor people’s committee, handling welfare, child-care, and foster-care legislation under Republican governor George Deukmejian.
Of course, I was running in the wrong direction, because politics was becoming less about policy and more about culture, but I learned a lot anyway. I had to grapple with Republicans for the first time in my life (outside my family). The big issue before the state legislature was welfare reform. I’ll never forget watching an exchange between a GOP assemblyman on my committee and a welfare mom who was testifying about why welfare reform was bad for families. The Republican used the language of feminism—women had to work now, his own wife worked, it was a new world of choice! When the welfare recipient asked, “Why can’t I choose to stay home with my kids?” he answered flatly, “That’s one choice you don’t have, ma’am.”
As a committee consultant, I sometimes attended constituent meetings in Oakland and Berkeley to hear concerns about welfare reform and other social policies. It was 1986, but people seemed stuck in the sixties, the bad version of the sixties that I’d missed. In some meetings, men were asked to leave so that women could talk freely. At times, whites would have to exit so that blacks had the space to talk without whites. I didn’t always see the point. White men still had most of the power, and if we didn’t learn to work with and confront them directly, our separate strength had less meaning. Also, as a feminist, I never understood marginalizing or humiliating male allies to make a separatist point; the men who came to these meetings were trying to make common cause; why shut them out? In at least two different Oakland meetings, heavily attended by welfare-rights groups, the very same African American woman stood up, as if on cue, pointed to me sitting with the decision-makers, and said angrily, “There’s only one reason you’re sitting there, and I’m standing here.” No one needed to spell out the reason: that I was white. I understood her anger, but it felt like theater, not practical politics intended to bring about change. (I also noticed that “minorities” always singled out other “minorities” at such times. Why didn’t she suggest an older white male colleague had taken the place that should have been hers?)
Occasionally, doing my work, I ran into the worst nightmares of the Reagan coalition. I remember interviewing a teenage welfare recipient for a magazine article I hoped would show that a new bipartisan wave of welfare reform was bad for mothers and children. The young woman talked openly about getting pregnant with a second child to increase her welfare check and move higher on the waiting list for Section 8 housing. She ignored her adorable toddler son while we talked, except to scream at him when he interrupted us. As we said good-bye, I remember watching her lock that chubby, flailing, adorable little boy into a way-too-small car seat, and the click of the lock reminded me of handcuffs. That girl wasn’t the norm, by any means, but it was impossible not to notice that without jobs or capital to start businesses or student grants for college, welfare was one of the few lifelines to cash in her abandoned neighborhood (the other was drugs). It would be stupid not to play the system.
Again, I found myself wondering why we’d ever believed that poor women, especially poor black women, would be supported (however stingily) in raising their children at home, when most mothers were surging to work, because the new economy required an extra paycheck to keep families afloat. I was beginning to believe that “empowering” welfare recipients, the mantra of the constituency groups we heard from, required getting them good jobs, child care, and health care and bringing them out of the economic shadows, where they’d been alone and vulnerable for too long. I wouldn’t admit it at the time, but I was starting to agree with Daniel Patrick Moynihan that we were wrong to “pension off” the most vulnerable Americans, that our fight ought to have been for jobs and inclusion. My questions would only get louder.
California Democrats soon joined with Deukmejian in passing landmark welfare reform legislation, which included work requirements for some mothers, nine years before Bill Clinton passed a federal reform law. Ronald Reagan’s state was leading again politically, this time with Democrats on board.
• • •
I hated Sacramento politics, but I liked my life. I met a kind, smart-aleck liberal lawyer at a political fund-raiser, and within a year we were engaged. He was Jewish, and I wondered whether that would bother my father at all. My father loved Robert. About two months after I told my dad I was getting married, he was diagnosed with late-stage cancer of the esophagus and was given four to six months to live. Robert and I moved up our wedding date to well within the dismal window the doctors gave my father, but he still couldn’t travel. So we went to him. We got married in his yard by a local judge, my father in a wheelchair, in front of our siblings, Robert’s parents, and my Aunt Peggy. My father’s brothers had booked tickets to San Francisco for our planned wedding day to cheer their dying brother, an enormously generous thing to do. Though my father couldn’t make it to San Francisco, they came anyway, so we flew back to have the wedding reception we had planned, without my father. Then we returned to honeymoon in my father’s hospice-outfitted home.
The last month was hell and then sometimes heaven. Friends and family came from everywhere. Aunt Peggy had moved in to take care of my father when he first got sick. My brother and sister and I stayed full-time; aunts and uncles came and went. Our friend Joe drove from Milwaukee to say good-bye. We listened to Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis and talked constantly. One of us was always up with him. It’s still one of my favorite memories and one of the most painful. He had the kind of home base he wanted, if only for a few days. In fact, I did, too.
Before he got too sick to watch television, during the day we’d follow the Iran Contra hearings, which cheered him up a little. John Dean had described the Watergate cover-up as a “cancer on the presidency”; battling the chaos of cancer, my father was soothed by the orderly processes of law: the hearing, the swearing-in, the congressional interrogators rooting out the lawlessness of Oliver North and his enablers. My father believed justice would be done here, if not in his own life, and Reagan would be brought down as Nixon was. He didn’t live to find out that Reagan got through it unscathed.
• • •
Losing my father, I also lost the political world he created, where his black-Irish fairytale meant you didn’t have to choose between the political interests of black people or my Irish working-class family. My father may have been the last person to live on both sides of Nixonland. Certainly, I had come to feel that I needed to choose sides, and I chose to work on issues of racial justice and to put class behind me. On some level, I was in the process of becoming the kind of elite do-gooder my father distrusted, proving my own moral superiority by championing the rights of African Americans and looking down on my “racist” kinfolk. At least for a while.
The fact was, many of my people did, over and over, vote against their class interests to try to go backward, and inward, to take refuge in their culture. A culture in which the sixties never happened: divorce rates didn’t rise, abortion stayed illegal, drugs remained in bohemia, kids obeyed their parents—and nobody got something for nothing. The result was, nobody got nothing, to use the working-class vernacular of my childhood, except the very rich. Nixon’s strategy of “cultural recognition” continued: Republicans such as Reagan pitched themselves as working-class heroes, even as they shook down the working class to redistribute wealth to the wealthiest.
The blue-collar pride of the white working class had itself become an empty form of identity politics, all about symbolism, relying on an imagined cohesion, ignoring the way a new corporate elite, not blacks or liberals or feminists, was grinding them down and obliterating their way of life. But if the Republicans manipulated them, the Democrats mostly ignored them. The party of the New Deal was in the process of becoming the party of Wall Street. We’d all be the poorer for it.