The most important economic difference is the stock market Before 1980, Wall Street was a secondary player, helping to improve industrial production. After 1980, Wall Street was the sole master of economics and politics and culture, devoted to bombing all of America down to bedrock. The tech tyrants like Andreesen love the market as it is now, and continue to defend it with the old myths. They're lying.
The simplest solution is to restore ALL of the New Deal's laws and restrictions on banking and trading and monopolies, restore the tariff structure of the 30s, and enforce ALL.of it ferociously. The Biden admin made a substantial start in this direction, but now it will go away.
One point that's overlooked in many of these discussions is the Democrats need to figure out how to restore the effectiveness of the bureaucracy, including accountability (more dismissal, less shuffling off to another department) for laziness, incompetence, and general uselessness, as well as corruption or misdeeds. As the party of the bureaucracy - and the favorite of government unions - the Democrats get the blame for bureaucratic inefficiency and bloat, at all levels of government.
It doesn't help that many large "blue cities" are poster children for awful government, as Noah Smith mentions. Universities and other levels of education are similarly bureaucratically bloated.
It does little good to advocate for bureaucrat-heavy policies if there's an unacknowledged reality that the bureaucracy is overly expensive and ineffective in implementing the policies we do have, and that new, "strong government" policies will generate new offices full of yet more useless time-servers.
A "MAGA Left" needs to focus not only on what it wants new government roles to be, but how to make the government we have more effective.
This article touches a lot of key places for understanding the past. The question is what to do now! I can't help but think of Piketty's two big works of the 20-teens. Happiness in a society starts with the ratio of income to wealth and the distribution of each across the population. We make income and if there is a surplus we build wealth assets. At the end of WWII total wealth was something more than twice what our economy produced each year. In 1915 during the Gilded Age the value of all wealth assets was seven times income. The 30 year period from 1915 to 1945 saw the greatest destruction of wealth ever seen. Global wars, revolution, chaos. Dark times compressed. We won and our boys (and girls) did it. I was born in 1952. Productivity was high, wealth to income ratio was 2.5:1, not 7:1 as it was in 1910 and 2024. Distribution was good. This is precisely what drives me so crazy the last 10 years. Wokeism is a strategy by the wealthy to get the college-educated wannabe elites to help wealth take even more. Woke DEIism foolishly thinks language shapes reality. You just stop saying illegal alien and say something like undocumented. The left left wealth and income distribution for nursing person. Piketty also shows that productivity trended down during Reagan when high taxes fell. Post war productivity sat on a foundation of broad taxing. Labor unions, rent control, etc. What did Bernie do after his bitter kneecapping in 2016? He went on a listening tour with the evil Tom Perez and in my home town of Portland Maine we booed Perez roundly. But Bernie submitted weakly to the humiliation of touring with Tom. Bernie has no balls. Not like Donald. Crazy to say, but true. Trump trust his fist into the air. And now we have two immigrants, Elon and Vivek, leading massive gov't cuts, which we absolutely need. But we also absolutely need capable competent gov't. A lot of the prosperity of the 50s came from what FDR did in the 30s, but really a lot of the deal emanated from anti trust Republicans at the turn of the century incl Teddy Roosevelt. "the floating signifiers of midcentury prosperity". Good phrase, great phrase, but what we need is more fair distribution of income and wealth, not the massive theft of wealth and income from the bottom 50% to the top 10/1% that characterizes what we have seen since the 70s.
We have a MAGA left. It's called Woke. The new morality police. Their moral codes may be totally opposite to those on the Right, they are moral codes nonetheless.
I don’t think it is boutique cultural politics to point out that these halcyon days of the 60s were that for white people specifically, and to some extent the structure was propped up by racism against non-whites. That does not negate any lessons to be learned from that era, but I think is a necessary contradiction to be acknowledged. The left in my view should not be MAGA, but MAGE, make America great for everybody. This is truly the key to what would be their success, represented by Bernie Sanders, but it was strangled in its infancy by the twin demons on the left, identity politics and neoliberal economics. Trumpism is worshipping a different demon entirely.
The most important economic difference is the stock market Before 1980, Wall Street was a secondary player, helping to improve industrial production. After 1980, Wall Street was the sole master of economics and politics and culture, devoted to bombing all of America down to bedrock. The tech tyrants like Andreesen love the market as it is now, and continue to defend it with the old myths. They're lying.
The simplest solution is to restore ALL of the New Deal's laws and restrictions on banking and trading and monopolies, restore the tariff structure of the 30s, and enforce ALL.of it ferociously. The Biden admin made a substantial start in this direction, but now it will go away.
One point that's overlooked in many of these discussions is the Democrats need to figure out how to restore the effectiveness of the bureaucracy, including accountability (more dismissal, less shuffling off to another department) for laziness, incompetence, and general uselessness, as well as corruption or misdeeds. As the party of the bureaucracy - and the favorite of government unions - the Democrats get the blame for bureaucratic inefficiency and bloat, at all levels of government.
It doesn't help that many large "blue cities" are poster children for awful government, as Noah Smith mentions. Universities and other levels of education are similarly bureaucratically bloated.
It does little good to advocate for bureaucrat-heavy policies if there's an unacknowledged reality that the bureaucracy is overly expensive and ineffective in implementing the policies we do have, and that new, "strong government" policies will generate new offices full of yet more useless time-servers.
A "MAGA Left" needs to focus not only on what it wants new government roles to be, but how to make the government we have more effective.
This article touches a lot of key places for understanding the past. The question is what to do now! I can't help but think of Piketty's two big works of the 20-teens. Happiness in a society starts with the ratio of income to wealth and the distribution of each across the population. We make income and if there is a surplus we build wealth assets. At the end of WWII total wealth was something more than twice what our economy produced each year. In 1915 during the Gilded Age the value of all wealth assets was seven times income. The 30 year period from 1915 to 1945 saw the greatest destruction of wealth ever seen. Global wars, revolution, chaos. Dark times compressed. We won and our boys (and girls) did it. I was born in 1952. Productivity was high, wealth to income ratio was 2.5:1, not 7:1 as it was in 1910 and 2024. Distribution was good. This is precisely what drives me so crazy the last 10 years. Wokeism is a strategy by the wealthy to get the college-educated wannabe elites to help wealth take even more. Woke DEIism foolishly thinks language shapes reality. You just stop saying illegal alien and say something like undocumented. The left left wealth and income distribution for nursing person. Piketty also shows that productivity trended down during Reagan when high taxes fell. Post war productivity sat on a foundation of broad taxing. Labor unions, rent control, etc. What did Bernie do after his bitter kneecapping in 2016? He went on a listening tour with the evil Tom Perez and in my home town of Portland Maine we booed Perez roundly. But Bernie submitted weakly to the humiliation of touring with Tom. Bernie has no balls. Not like Donald. Crazy to say, but true. Trump trust his fist into the air. And now we have two immigrants, Elon and Vivek, leading massive gov't cuts, which we absolutely need. But we also absolutely need capable competent gov't. A lot of the prosperity of the 50s came from what FDR did in the 30s, but really a lot of the deal emanated from anti trust Republicans at the turn of the century incl Teddy Roosevelt. "the floating signifiers of midcentury prosperity". Good phrase, great phrase, but what we need is more fair distribution of income and wealth, not the massive theft of wealth and income from the bottom 50% to the top 10/1% that characterizes what we have seen since the 70s.
AN OPEN LETTER TO MY GLOATING MAGA NEIGHBOR
You Know Who You Are: Your House Still Draped in MAGA Banners, Red Hat Firmly on Your Head, and Truck Plastered with Trump Stickers
https://open.substack.com/pub/patricemersault/p/an-open-letter-to-my-gloating-maga-450?r=4d7sow&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
We have a MAGA left. It's called Woke. The new morality police. Their moral codes may be totally opposite to those on the Right, they are moral codes nonetheless.
I wrote about this back in April 2016 when Trump was first rising. https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2016/04/on-making-america-great-again/ I would have loved to see America made *economically* great again.
I don’t think it is boutique cultural politics to point out that these halcyon days of the 60s were that for white people specifically, and to some extent the structure was propped up by racism against non-whites. That does not negate any lessons to be learned from that era, but I think is a necessary contradiction to be acknowledged. The left in my view should not be MAGA, but MAGE, make America great for everybody. This is truly the key to what would be their success, represented by Bernie Sanders, but it was strangled in its infancy by the twin demons on the left, identity politics and neoliberal economics. Trumpism is worshipping a different demon entirely.