In the mythology of the ancient world, there existed a fabulously seductive group of female beings known as the Sirens who would seat themselves on the out-cropping of a cliff over-looking the ocean and, by their alluring songs and ravishing beauty, lure to destruction on the rocks below all the sea-farers who saw or heard them as they sailed by. They were one of the dangers encountered by Odysseus; but being forewarned by Circe, he closed the ears of his sailors with wax and warned them to look straight ahead; but he had himself bound to the mast before passing their coasts, so that he could both see and hear them as he passed by. Al-though he lived, he was never the same again.
Today, the Siren Song of Pat Buchanan can be heard in the land, and countless numbers of evangelicals are listening. And there is a kind of seductive truth in what he is saying, not only with regard to the "Culture War" (Kultur Kampf), but with regard to Free Trade, the loss of high paying U.S. industrial and manufacturing jobs to Third World sweat shops in the Far East and Latin America, and the uncaring attitude of the nation's moneyed elites - both Republican and Democratic - to the pain all this has engendered in the American Middle Class. So loud is Buchanan's message resonating among rank and file evangelicals that even the opposition to Buchanan's candidacy by Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, James Dobson, Lou Sheldon and most of the rest of the Religious Right's luminaries - who long ago "sold out" to "Big Money" over Free Trade, NAFTA, GATT, etc. - has been unable to staunch the stream of support leaving the Dole campaign and flowing towards Buchanan. What Buchanan is saying about Free Trade, the multinational corporations, etc. is true!
But in answering Buchanan's call to enter the fray "to take the nation back for Christ and the Church" from the moneyed establishment, what Christians are in danger of doing is being drawn onto the rocks and destroyed, just as surely as the Argonauts were destroyed by the Sirens of Greek mythology. This is precisely what happened to German Christians sixty years ago. There is a beautiful side to evil, as one prominent Christian author has alleged - and it's true. As Christians, we think that we can spot evil because surely evil is an ugly and disgusting thing - but that's not necessarily the case. Fascism has been greatly misportrayed to Americans as something monstrous and hateful. In the end, of course, it is. But that's not how it starts out! On the surface, the case against the elites and for Buchanan is compelling.
William Greider, former assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, writes, "At the highest levels of government (today), the power to decide things has ... gravitated from the many to the few ... (The) government responds (in this day and age) more often to narrow webs of power (than it does to the cares of average citizens) - (to) the interests of major economic organizations and concentrated wealth and the influential elites surrounding them (than to the welfare and needs of every-day working people) ..."[1]
Echoing Greider, Dr. Robert W. Merry, Executive Director of the influential Congressional Quarterly, traces this phenomenon to the development of a historically unprecedented and powerful elite in this country - a multicultural, multinational (globalist) corporate aristocracy (encompassing within it the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican Parties) with very little economic, social or cultural connection to ordinary American citizens [2] - a meritocracy based on education, wealth, social status and "international connections."
Greider continues,
"The decayed condition of American democracy (a democracy which heretofore had connected ordinary people to their government) is difficult to grasp, not because the facts are secret, but because the facts are visible everywhere. Symptoms of distress are accumulating freely in the political system and citizens are demoralized ... A climate of stagnant doubt has enveloped contemporary politics, a generalized sense of disappointment that is too diffuse and intangible to be easily confronted. The things that Americans were (once) taught and still wish to believe ... no longer seem to fit the present reality.
"This dissonance ... is so discomforting that many naturally turn away from the implications. The visible dysfunctions in politics are dismissed as a temporary aberration or explained away, cynically, as the way things always were. The(se) ... evasions are understandable: some unwanted truths are too painful to face ... (However, the fact is) American democracy is in much deeper trouble than most people wish to acknowledge. Behind the reassuring facade, the regular election contests and so forth, the substantive meaning of (American) self-government has been hollowed out. What exists behind the formal shell is a systemic breakdown of the shared civic values we call democracy ...
"In place of meaningful democracy, the political community (i.e., the new elite) has embraced a ... culture of false appearances ... (The governing elite) responds to the public’s desires (and needs) with an artful dance of symbolic (and vacant) gestures - hollow laws that are emptied of serious content in the private bargaining of Washington. Promises are made and never kept. Laws are enacted and never enforced. When ordinary people organize themselves to confront the deception, they find themselves too marginalized to make much difference." [3]
Dr. Merry warns ominously that - as a result of the disconnection between ordinary citizens and the nation’s governing elite -
"a clash (is brewing) ... between two fundamentally (opposing) political forces, (1) the establishment (elite) (represented by Bob Dole and President Clinton), and (2) (a new) anti-establishment (anti-elite) populism" (represented by Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot). [4]
Professor George Kennan, the principal architect of the successful U.S. "Containment Policy" against the old Soviet Union, echoes Merry’s warning. In an interview on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, he cautioned that should the clash between these two forces be left to proceed unchecked the country could unravel politically, rendering the nation ungovernable. [5]
Remarking on the strain between the two forces (i.e., the elite, on the one hand, and the populists, on the other), Greider writes,
"(While) this tension is as old as the Republic, a peculiarly (new) dimension has developed in modern politics. Politicians ... (have always) been held in (at least some) contempt by the public. That is well known and not exactly new in American history. What is less well understood ... is the deep contempt politicians (and the new elite they represent) have for the general public (today)." [6]
Just how pervasive and powerful this elite has become can be measured by such things as [7] (1) the debate over health care, where the elite has effectively stymied meaningful reform in the nation’s health care system in the face of almost 70% of the nation’s population who believe that health care reform is necessary; (2) the debate over "cultural values" where the elite has forced a global, multiculturalism on American society over the disapproval of some 60% of the people who stridently disagree with the elite on such matters as "women in combat," "homosexual rights," "militant feminism," "affirmative action," "school busing," and so forth; (3) the way the elite has pursued a cold and calculated policy of "deindustrialization" of the nation’s manufacturing core over the objections of more than 65 % of the people who see their jobs fleeing the country in search of lower wages, etc. - the examples are almost too numerous to cite.
And in this connection, it should be noted that there is really very little difference in the cultural values between the elites in the Democratic Party as opposed to the cultural values of the elites in the Republican Party. Both elites are essentially multiculturally oriented - the only difference is the Republican elites are willing to trade away some of their multiculturalism in exchange for the votes of the Religious Right on economic matters. Even then, however, the antipathy of the Republican patricians towards their Religious Right allies is fairly palpable.
Just how broad the disconnection between the "establishment party" (Dr. Merry’s word) and the "populist mass" (Dr. Merry’s word, again) has proceeded was amply displayed in the 1993 furor over the nomination of Zoe Baird for Attorney General of the United States, and the firestorm which resulted shortly thereafter over the issue of gays in the military. On both accounts, the Clinton Administration - an administration which had come to power ostensibly as the champion of ordinary people over and against Bush and the Republican Party "Patricians" - was caught flat footed by the reaction of the "populist mass;" the Administration simply - and quite honestly - had not anticipated such a heated reaction by the American public. Over and over again, elite media commentators displayed an incredulousness over the way Ms. Baird was pilloried for hiring an illegal alien to act as a nanny for her child. They simply failed to grasp the disdain of ordinary folk towards the yuppie lifestyle of the "establishment" - which most of them (meaning the media) were also a part.
On the question of gays in the military, the disconnection between the establishment and ordinary people was even more starkly revealed. As switchboards on Capitol Hill and the White House lit up in a red hot response to the Clinton Administration’s pressure on the military to admit avowed homosexuals, White House press secretary George Stephanopoulos reacted angrily at a news briefing on the 28th of January (1993): he charged that the reaction against gays in the military was simply an orchestrated response by Randall Terry of Operation Rescue and other members of the Religious Right. And where was his proof? He had none except to say that the 700 Club had urged its viewers to call the White House and Capitol Hill, which it (i.e., the 700 Club) does on a regular basis on a variety of other issues.
Countless other groups - liberal and conservative alike (for example, the National Organization of Women, the National Rifle Association, the Sierra Club, etc.) - also regularly call upon their members to phone the White House and Capitol Hill when facing a presidential or congressional action with which they disagree. For example, on February 8, 1993, the CBS Evening News ran a piece showing a super sophisticated phone bank operated by the National Organization of Women (NOW). Operators were phoning the NOW membership to urge a national "call in" to the White House and members of Congress in opposition to a piece of legislation which NOW opposed. The practice is common. Why should this particular "call in" request by the 700 Club be any different from the NOW "call-in" request to its membership? And why should it be singled out and treated in such "hyped" terms by the media and Stephanopoulos as so much more of a threat than NOW’s actions? or even past "call in" requests by the 700 Club? The fact of the matter is, nothing could explain the massive amounts of "call ins" which were pouring into the White House and members of Congress; and Stephanopoulos’ lame attempt to lay the blame at the doorstep of the 700 Club was a sham, and most people seemed to recognize it as such.
Stephanopoulos seemed genuinely unable to grasp - let alone understand - the depth of feeling ordinary people have against the concept of avowed homosexuals in the military.
But it wasn't just Stephanopoulos; most of the nation’s newspaper editors were equally shocked by the public's reaction. For instance, on the evening of January 29th, a large number of so-called "representative" newspaper editors from throughout the country (Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Milwaukee, San Diego, etc.) appeared on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. Supposedly they all depicted differing editorial viewpoints, conservative and liberal alike. Nonetheless, they were all in favor of gays in the military and appeared to genuinely believe that opposition to it was coming from nothing more than "backwoods fundamentalists" and bigots. To a person they seemed to agree that the phone calls were being orchestrated by the Religious Right. None of them, of course, had a shred of evidence to substantiate their charges other than to regurgitate what Stephanopoulos had said a day earlier. Not one editor could bring himself to admit that the phone calls which were coming into the White House and Capitol Hill were being generated by people who honestly held a differing viewpoint.
William Raspberry, a well known black journalist, came closest to understanding what was really happening; writing in his syndicated column of Friday, January 29th, [8] he wrote with a good deal of perception and insight:
"Why does the military establishment feel threatened by President Clinton’s promise to lift the ban against gays? What is it that so many rank-and-file Americans - including most of the ex-servicemen I’ve talked to - fear will happen to military discipline and morale if the ban is lifted?
"The temptation is to dismiss the reaction to the Clinton proposal as anti-gay bigotry (as most of the nation’s editors have done) - on a par with the reaction surrounding President Truman’s decision to desegregate the military racially.
"Indeed, there may be some homophobia involved, but I think it goes beyond dislike of homosexuals, even beyond a wish to exclude them from the military. There seems to be some larger fear that lurks just beyond our ability to define it - a sense that we may be about to release some deadly cultural genie ...
"I’m guessing that if the lifting of the ban meant only that homosexual service personnel would no longer have to lie, no one would care very much. But the fear is that something else would change, in unhealthy directions ...
"Lifting the ban might be easy and relatively noncontroversial if it were just a matter of fairness ...
"But when the goal moves beyond popularly perceived fairness and comes to condoning sexual behavior, a lot of people - not all of them bigots - start bailing out. There’s a difference between a homosexual saying, on the one hand, ‘My sexual orientation and behavior are none of your business’, and, on the other hand, ‘I demand that you acknowledge my sexual choices as the exact equivalent of yours’. The former is a matter of privacy, the latter of culture."
Moreover, one should not jump to the conclusion that this represents merely a division between Republicans and Democrats; many establishment Republicans expressed similar initial disbelief regarding the reaction of the "populist mass" against gays in the military - though Republicans later "recovered" and sought to make political hay over the issue; but one could not quite suppress the lingering suspicion that most Republicans were as equally shocked as most Democrats at all the fuss, at least "old line establishment" Republicans.
It’s not just events like Zoe Baird and gays in the military that reveal the divide which has developed between the establishment and ordinary Americans. Take affirmative action. In enacting the 1991 civil rights law - which occurred on President Bush’s watch and with his approval - the establishment party, Republicans and Democrats alike, knew that voters strongly opposed racial quotas in hiring and promotion. So when final agreement was reached, both wings of the establishment party - again, Democrats and Republicans alike - merely declared the bill to be devoid of quota implications, even though it wasn’t. Result: a further deepening of the gulf between the establishment and ordinary people.
Then there’s the matter of schools. Dr. Thomas Sowell, a black and a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute in Stanford, California, cautions that the so-called establishment is particularly out of touch with the majority of Middle Americans on this issue; specifically, prayer in the schools, the distribution of condoms, bi-lingualism, school vouchers, etc. Further, he warns that many newspaper editors and media commentators throughout the country are "spitting into the wind" when they fulminate over the possibility that the Religious Right is trying to take over the public schools. The fact of the matter is, Sowell believes, most Middle Americans support the re-imposition of "Judeo-Christian" ethics into the school curriculum.
Moreover, Sowell says that many Middle Americans are asking themselves where the media was when the political left imposed its values on the schools beginning some twenty years ago. Sowell writes: "Where have the media been all these years, while the most blatant, deliberate and pervasive indoctrination by the political left has been taking place in public schools across the country?"
Sowell continues,
"Hypothetical dangers from conservative or religious groups attempting to fight back do not begin to compare with the dangers from the enormous apparatus already in place, and continuing to conduct classroom brainwashing, to the detriment of academic education ... There is, for example, the whole Alice-in-Wonderland world of multiculturalism, where the very photographs and drawings in textbooks ... propagandize the multicultural message. There are math textbooks where the pictures of famous mathematicians and scientists would suggest that virtually no white man ever had anything to do with (the field of mathematics) ... ." [9]
Millions of Middle Americans agree with Sowell’s analysis - yet the "establishment" continues to push multiculturalism with very little regard to the wishes and values of most Americans.
And what about The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)? Since 1973 solid majorities have consistently favored increased import restrictions. These majorities have expressed intense anger over NAFTA. Professor Alfred E. Eckes of the University of Ohio writes: "The North American Free Trade Agreement may mesmerize and motivate Washington policy makers, but in the American heartland these initiatives translate as further efforts to promote international order (i.e., peace on America’s southern border) at the expense of existing American jobs." [10]
Nonetheless, the "establishment" pushed it through in the late fall of 1994, seemingly oblivious to the concerns of real Americans. And just how callous these elites were to the concerns of average Americans is easily demonstrated. For example, take the attitude of Representative Bob Matsui (D-California), who had been tapped by then House Speaker Tom Foley (D-Washington) to lead the bi-partisan effort to push NAFTA through the House. He never denied the fact that there would be large scale worker layoffs as a result of the NAFTA agreement, and in a meeting with the usually liberal editorial staff of the Sacramento Bee, he said as much: "(Yes), there will be displacement. That’s what change is all about" - but that the treaty was essential diplomatically and that there would eventually be a payoff in better jobs sometime in the future.
Shocked by the cold directness of Matsui’s remarks, John Jacobs, the Bee’s political editor, wrote in response the next day, "If that’s the best answer Matsui, Rostenkowski, Clinton and Sen. Bill Bradley, who is most likely to be Matsui’s opposite number in the Senate, can give to American labor at a time when the jobs issue supersedes everything else, it’s little wonder they face an uphill battle to pass NAFTA." [11]
Alarmed at all this, Republican Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who opposed the treaty, warned, "The American foreign policy establishment is dangerously out of touch with the American people (on this issue)." Helm was echoed by Congressman Richard Gephardt. [12] Gephardt, Helms and others had been greatly disturbed by studies published by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Skidmore College which indicated that the eventual NET loss of jobs which NAFTA would impose on the American economy lay somewhere between 290,000 and 490,000. These figures sent shivers up their spines. But the elites in both parties chose to ignore these concerns.
Professor Eckes warns,
"... public support for a liberal trade policy depends on more than vague promises about future export-related jobs and lectures on the benefits that consumers derive from low-cost imports. In the absence of secure and abundant employment, consumer concerns fade in importance. Most consumers are less concerned about the price of goods than about their own ability to pay the price. And recent experience in the current recession underscores another economic truth: the unemployed worker is not a happy consumer. Indeed the rapid transfer of jobs from high-cost to low-wage countries in a world of deregulated markets multiplies uncertainty and discourages consumption among those lacking employment security. Twenty years ago only production workers had to worry about losing jobs to cheap foreign competition. In the 1990s open borders have spread insecurity to millions of service and professional workers." [13]
Finally, there was the curious matter regarding the disconnection between the New York Times, an icon of elite U.S. journalism, and Rush Limbaugh, a popular radio talk show host and exemplar of the new populism currently sweeping through America’s heartland. In the Winter of 1992-’93 Limbaugh’s book, The Way Things Ought to Be, topped the New York Times best-seller list for 16 weeks, but the Times never reviewed it. Limbaugh said the paper didn’t like his politics. In reply, Times Book Review editor, Rebecca Sinkler remarked contemptuously, "This is not the sort of book that usually finds its way into our pages. Though I suppose if we had known that it was going to be at the top of the best-seller list for weeks and weeks and weeks ..." [14] The disconnection here between the media and what ordinary people are thinking screams out for recognition - and, more somberly, as a warning to all those who will listen. [15]
Indeed, the growing evidence of "de-coupling" between the leadership of the country and the people - as is occurring not only in this country, but throughout the entire Western World - is suggestive of an "ivory tower" phenomenon which has left the nation’s leaders in both political parties out of touch with the reality of what’s really happening in the country at large. Speaking concerning this disconnection, Kevin Phillips, author of the book, Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity, writes: "These (the members of America’s new elite) are people who spent Vietnam in Oxford; they are $500,000 (-a-year) lawyers who hire illegal immigrants as baby-sitters; they are hotshot lobbyists. This group has no understanding of the kind of sacrifices made every day by the $26,000-a-year couple in Peoria, Illinois. They don’t speak the language of the older generation that fought World War II or the language of the under-30 generation that hasn’t shared in the circumstances of the boomers."
The question now might fairly be asked, just exactly who constitutes this new elite? Perhaps the best way of identifying it is to go back some ten years ago to a project conducted in San Diego by the editorial staff of the San Diego Union. The author of this study, Richard Louv, [16] was a special projects reporter for the paper; he was encouraged by Gerald Warren, Peter Kaye, and J.D. Alexander, a group of the paper’s editors, to travel around the country and describe what he saw. Warren, Kaye and Alexander had been gripped for some time with the thought that something fundamental was happening in the country; that unprecedented and massive changes in the structure of the American economy were occurring - changes which they were only dimly beginning to appreciate; and changes which were already altering the core nature of the society with which they had grown up.
Louv discovered that the changes which Warren, Kaye and Alexander had noticed stemmed principally from the development in the late ’60s and early ’70s of the multinational corporation, corporations which had - as Robert Reich explains in his book, The Work of Nations - "slipped the bonds of national allegiance," and in doing so had created a new globalist, multicultural caste and ethic. [17] The last thing these new corporations wanted for themselves - and even their employees - was too great an identification with any one particular culture, race or religion - and this included too tight an identification with America and the European, Christian-based civilization that had historically undergirded the country. Anything which could be perceived as "separating" these new corporations and their employees from their clients and customers in the new world market place had to be avoided - and nothing has historically so thoroughly separated human beings from each other as race, culture, and religion; that these new multinational corporations had to be multicultural seemed to be self evident.
And just how deeply American companies, even the older, more established ones - the ones usually thought of as "American" - had by the early 1990s become involved in the new globalism becomes evident when one looks at where these companies derive their profits today in terms of sales divided between foreign and domestic markets. For example, a company as American as apple pie as the Disney Corporation gets almost 25% of its revenues from foreign operations; General Electric derives a similar amount from foreign sales; Dun & Bradstreet has 40 percent of its revenues coming from abroad; and General Motors, one-third. Jack Welch of General Electric and chairman of the National Business Council, reflecting the new globalism of American corporations, recently remarked, "We’re all globalists now, and we are staying that way." [18]
This is the new elite; an elite which is financially connected (directly or indirectly as shareholders, managers, employees, consultants, contractors, lawyers, lobbyists, etc.) to the new multi-national corporations; an elite which is growing ever more distant from the rest of society; and one which is increasingly disengaging itself physically and institutionally from most other Americans. It’s a world of walled and gated communities, computers and high-tech jobs, exotic imported goods, BMWs, Lexuses, Jaguars and Volvos, "high amp," private schools, swimming pools, golf courses, and tennis courts - and all this on an impressively large scale encompassing surprisingly high numbers of people. [19]
In the service of this new elite stand the minions of Washington’s K Street [20] - the lawyers, the lobbyists, the public-relation agencies, the direct-mail companies, the opinion-polling firms (capable of churning out polling statistics able to support the most outlandish propositions), the think tanks, the tax-exempt foundations - all financed by the new elite. Does the elite want facts to support this or that claim? - the minions of K Street pump them out. Do they want "expert opinions" from scholars? - they have "experts" in abundance. Does the elite want opinion polls supporting their stand on certain issues? - it hires polling firms to produce them. Does the elite want people - live voters who support their policies? - K Street delivers. [21]
Take just one example, Jack Bonner of Bonner and Associates. Greider writes, "When the Senate was debating the new clean-air legislation in 1990, certain wavering senators received pleas from the ‘grassroots’ on the question of controlling automobile pollution. The Big Brothers and Big Sisters of the Mahoning Valley wrote to Senator John Glenn of Ohio. Sam Nunn of Georgia heard from the Georgia Baptist Convention and its 1.2 million members. The Easter Seal Society of South Dakota lobbied Senator Thomas Daschle. The Delaware Paralyzed Veterans Association contacted William V. Roth ... These citizen organizations were persuaded to take a stand by Bonner and Associates, which informed them, consistent with the auto industry’s political propaganda, that tougher fuel standards would make it impossible to manufacture any vehicle larger than a Ford Escort or Honda Civic. Jack Bonner was thrilled by their expressions of alarm and so was the auto industry that paid for them. Bonner’s fee, which he coyly described as somewhere between $500,000 and $ 1 million, was for scouring six states for potential grassroots voices, coaching them on the ‘facts’ of the issue, paying for the phone calls and plane fares to Washington and hiring the hall for a joint press conference."
Greider goes on to say, "The democratic discourse is now dominated by such transactions - information, opinion and scholarly expertise produced by and for the self-interested sponsors. Imagine Bonner’s technique multiplied and elaborated in different ways across hundreds of public issues and you can begin to envision the girth of this industry. Some firms produce artfully designed opinion polls, more or less guaranteed to yield results that suggest public support for the ... (elite’s) positions. Some firms specialize in coalition building - assembling dozens or hundreds of civic organizations and interest groups in behalf of lobbying goals." [22]
"This is (the new) democracy and it costs a fortune. Democracy-for-hire smothers the contemporary political debates and, while it does not always prevail, relatively few Americans have the resources to hire a voice for themselves. David Cohen of the Advocacy Institute, which trains citizens in how to lobby for their causes, recognizes a kind of class system emerging in the political process itself. ‘We are moving to a system’, he said, ‘where there are two different realms of citizens - a society in which those with the resources are going to have the ability to dominate the debate and outcomes while others are not going to be able to draw on the tools of persuasion’. If democratic expression is reduced to a question of money, then those with money will always have more." [23]
And what about ordinary Americans? - those who have been left behind in the older, non-global, more nationally oriented smoke stack industries which dominated the country before "free trade" and the new globalism kicked in? Their economic well-being has been deteriorating almost in reverse proportion to the rise of the new elite.
William Greider writes that the rise of transnational enterprises and production systems, and the easy mobility of capital investment and jobs from one country to another has had a devastating impact on the average American. It is -
"... a (ruthless) system that searches the world for the lowest common denominator in terms of national standards of wages ... and corporate obligations to health, the environment and stable communities. Left unchallenged, the global system will ... undermine America’s widely shared prosperity ... (and) will subvert the nation’s ability to set its own political standards and the laws that uphold the shared values of American society. The economic consequences of globalized production have already been experienced by the millions of U.S. industrialized workers who, during the last two decades, were displaced when their high-wage jobs were transferred to cheaper labor in foreign countries. This transformation, more than anything else, is what has led to the declining real wages in the United States and the weakening manufacturing base ..." [24]
Confirming Greider’s analysis, Paul Glastris writes in U.S. News & World Report, "... the biggest reason for the deterioration of (the) working-class is that the post-industrial economy (has) passed them by. The old assembly-line and manufacturing jobs which sustained ... (them) ... have disappeared (as a result of ‘free trade’), and have not been replaced." [25]
Brian O’Reilly, writing in Fortune Magazine, explains:
"The Great American (industrial) Job Machine, which once routinely churned out millions of high-wage (manufacturing) jobs (and supportive white collar work) ... is shifting gears - downward. Solid middle-class jobs, the kind that allow a single worker to be the family breadwinner, have been disappearing in record numbers and are being replaced more often than not by lower wage jobs, many of them astonishingly inadequate. This change first hit factory floors in the 1970s (as the result of increasing economic globalism). Though U.S. manufacturers have bounced back in the global competition (by restructuring and increasing productivity - words which have come to mean permanently laying off countless numbers of workers and producing the same goods with far fewer people at much lower wages), their ability to generate an abundance of good (high paying) jobs hasn’t (revived). Now the same ugly trend is devastating the long-invulnerable service, white collar (and public sector workers) ... as well." [26]
These jobs are gone and will not be replaced with comparable ones.
Remarking on the phenomenon of "down-waging" that is sweeping through the American workplace, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele write: "American workers are increasingly being forced to move from jobs that once paid $15 an hour into jobs that now pay $7." [27]
Putting "down-waging" in perspective, Bartlett and Steele continue:
"Measured in terms of buying power ... (the wages of today’s workers) fell far short of their parents’ and grandparents’ earnings. To understand why, let’s go back in time, to 1952 and the opening of Levittown, Pennsylvania ... (perhaps the greatest) symbol of (America’s) flourishing middle class (of that era). It took a factory worker one day to earn enough money to pay the closing costs on a new Levittown house, then selling for $10,000. More importantly, that was an era when the overwhelming majority of families buying homes relied on the income of (only) one wage-earner. In 1991, it took a ... worker eighteen weeks to earn enough money to pay the closing costs on that same Levittown home, now selling for $100,000 or more. Unfortunately, even if the average ... worker of the 1990s had the minimum down payment, his income would be insufficient for him to qualify for a mortgage in Levittown ... On a more mundane level, a store clerk in 1952 had to work two hours to pay for 100 postage stamps. In 1991, a store clerk had to work six hours to buy (the same) 100 stamps (now costing 32 cents)."
O’Reilly writes,
"Suddenly millions of Americans worry not merely about staying employed, but about staying employed in jobs that will support anything close to their current standard of living. That’s why ... the general level of economic anxiety in the country has climbed to unprecedented heights ... Declining incomes, or the fear of future declines (is everywhere rampant)." [28]
Just how serious is the job situation? "Very serious," says O’Reilly. For example, take the so-called job expansion of the 1980s, leaving aside the last three years of recession which would make the numbers even worse: though the U.S. economy added 13.6 million full-time jobs between 1979 and 1989, this much-touted boom was a bust for many workers. A Fortune analysis of Labor Department wage data reveals that nearly five million of these jobs paid less than $250 a week, or $13,000 a year, after adjusting for inflation. That’s below the official poverty level for a family of four. More than 1.6 million of those low-paying jobs were positions in restaurants, stockrooms, and retail sales, where the chances for promotion are low. [29]
Echoing the findings of O’Reilly, Bartlett and Steele write, "Between 1981 and 1991, a total of 1.8 million (high-wage) manufacturing jobs (permanently) vanished in the United States - a decline of 9 percent (in only 10 years)." [30] Using a slightly different measure, the Census Bureau calculates that 18.9% of full-time workers had low-wage jobs in 1979. Ten years later this dismal figure rose to 23.1% of the work force, and the recent recession pushed it up to 25.7%. This means that one-quarter of the American work force earns wages which places them at or only slightly above the official poverty level for a family of four.
And for industrial workers who thrived on last decade’s defense buildup, the peace dividend promises mainly pink slips. Robert Paulson, a consultant with McKinsey & Co. in Los Angeles, estimates that aerospace accounts for 20% of the manufacturing jobs in California. But only 15% of those workers have easily transferable skills. Many more have arcane talents, those of aero-dynamicists or composite materials shapers, and half are employed in paperwork and support jobs dealing with federal contract and hiring rules. Demand from nondefense employers for those talents is negligible. "They won’t get jobs designing mass-transit systems or environmental technology," says Paulson. "They will wind up working in Kmart or selling real estate."
Indeed, according to Labor Department data, the fastest growing occupations in the U.S. are mostlyn low wage jobs - a group that includes paralegals, medical assistants, and computer repairers, etc. These jobs will generate a total of 694,000 new jobs between 1989 and the year 2000. Among the other careers that will provide the greatest number of new jobs during the 1990s, says the Labor Department, are janitors and maids (556,000), waiters (551,000), and hundreds of thousands more receptionists, hospital orderlies, and clerks. [31] All of these jobs are low-end jobs. Moreover, in terms of higher wages, the "low-end" high-tech workers - which represent the vast majority of employees in high-tech industries - are not participating at all in the fruits of the high-tech revolution unleashed by the New Meritocracy. The wages for these workers are often less than one third what they were in the old-line industrial sector.
Increasingly, we are facing a situation in which there exists two Americas - separate and unequal - which uneasily exist side by side with each other. Two societies in one nation: [32]
Each has its own separate set of values and ethics; and each has very little understanding of the other.
And this is where "the rubber meets the road;" it is precisely this older America (# 2 above) which is the driving force behind the growing transformation of the evangelical and Catholic churches into an organized - or at least highly networked - POLITICAL instrumentality. These churches appear to be moving into this process largely by default. Middle America seems to have nowhere else to turn for an instrumentality around which it can organize to protect itself economically, socially and culturally.
The elites of the first America above have co-opted most of the nation's other institutions. Take, for example, the Democratic Party, which until 1973 represented the interests of traditional Middle Americans. Today it is controlled by interests whose social agenda has become repugnant to many of these same voters, especially whites and even some middle class blacks. Essentially, these are the "Reagan Democrats" who in earlier times had constituted the "core constituency" of the Democratic Party.
Most Middle Americans tend to be working-class "economic-liberals;" that is to say, they are in favor of the economic policies historically championed by the Democrats such as universal health care, adequate social security, government regulation of the work place, progressive tax legislation, and U.S. trade policies which favor domestic industries and American workers over foreign industries and foreign workers. At the same time, however, the Democratic Party is also aligned with a globalist world view which is reflected in its multicultural social policies, most of which are offensive to Middle Americans: abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, school busing, etc. The moral grounding of most Middle Americans still continues to revolve around the traditional conservative moral teachings of their churches, whether Catholic or evangelical - the protestations of many liberal academics notwithstanding. Indeed, there is perhaps nothing so well calculated to send "traditional" blue collar, middle class workers into orbit as a "loud-mouthed" Mollie Yard spouting out hard-line feminist verbiage. At the same time, however, these same workers cannot hide their disdain for the effete "country club" patricians of the Republican Party - like Lamar Alexander, Bob Dole, Robert Mossbacher, etc. - who wouldn’t be caught dead in a K-Mart or driving a domestically made automobile.
To the great mass of Middle Americans, it’s an "either or" proposition: they can vote for EITHER the Democratic Party, which represents best their economic interests (at least prior to the NAFTA and GATT votes), OR the Republican Party, which represents best their social and cultural interests; but they can’t have it both ways. If they vote for the Democrats, they must sacrifice their cultural and social interests; and if they vote for the Republicans, they sacrifice their economic interests. As a result, a disconnection between "Middle America" and both political parties has occurred. Middle Americans have reason to feel uncomfortable in both camps; as a consequence, their otherwise impressive numerical strength has been effectively diffused.
However, Republicans and Democrats may be making a great mistake to think that the political power of Middle America can continue to be neutralized in such a fashion. And that, frankly, is what Pat Buchanan (and, to a certain extent, Ross Perot) is all about. What Buchanan may be on the verge of doing is breaking this impasse, and in the process creating a new political alliance of social conservatives (which today are mainly found in the Republican Party's right-wing) and blue-collar Democrats - leaving in the process the liberal social elites of the Democratic Party and the laissez faire patricians of the Republican party - both of which are card-carrying members of the New America - out in the cold.
Kevin Phillips, a well known writer and publisher who predicted some years ago the rise of the Religious Right as a major player in American politics, believes - like Merry and Kennan - that a "new American Revolution" is brewing, and that at the core of this new revolution is the "Religious Right."
Phillips contends that the politics of the Religious Right have been growing in sophistication and appeal for some years now. The movement has been shedding its narrow "fundamentalist" image. At the same time it has also been displacing its older more constricted leadership - while still managing to retain its loyalty - and has been spreading rapidly from denomination to denomination. Phillips identifies Patrick J. Buchanan, a Catholic with blue collar roots, as a precursor of things to come; he believes that people are making a big mistake to write Buchanan and others like him off.
Phillips writes: "Buchanan’s battle cry is that ... (Republicans and Democrats alike) have betrayed the middle class ... The feisty ex-commentator calls for a ‘Middle Class Revolution’ to reclaim ... (the nation) for the middle class and take it away from the ‘Ivy League globalists’, ‘vulture capitalists’ and well heeled Washington lobbyists for Japan who have made the onetime ... (government) of Peoria and Pasadena into the voice of Park Avenue and Palm Springs ... This kind of talk sets the Muffies and (Yuppies) to (quivering) ... ." [41]
As if to reinforce Phillips’ remarks about him a week earlier, Buchanan remarked to a group of supporters on February 29th, "There is too much collusion, collaboration and cave-ins between ... Republicans and Democrats in Washington ... We’ve got to break up that one-party government in Washington. We’ve got to overturn it ... ."
And in saying this, Buchanan is merely echoing in "street-talk-idiom" the fears of scholars like Dr. Kennan and Dr. Merry regarding the failure of establishment politicians to pay attention to the cultural and economic concerns of ordinary people. It’s not just the academics who recognize one-party government when they see it. The so-called "populist mass" is also beginning to catch on.
Buchanan repeated this theme again in Boston to blue collar Catholics: "If you belong to the Exeter-Yale ... club (i.e., the yuppie "Zoe Baird" Meritocracy) ... (busing) is not going to bother you greatly because, as we know, it’s not their children who get bused out of South Boston (a well-known Catholic blue collar neighborhood in the city of Boston) into Roxbury (a poor black neighborhood) ... it’s the sons and daughters of Middle America who pay the price of reverse discrimination advanced by the Walker Point crowd (a closed community of the well-to-do Meritocracy) ... to salve their social consciences at other people’s expense." [42]
And just how close is Buchanan, a blue collar Catholic, to the evangelicals? Very close indeed! L. Brent Bozell III, Gary Mueller, and Frank Luntz - who today constitute Buchanan’s "brain trust" - all worked with the late Terry Dolan in founding the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) which was one of the early secular organizations directly responsible for the creation of the Religious Right, and enticing Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Robison, and other evangelicals into the political process. These "new revolutionists" are feeding off the failure of the political elites in both the older parties to address the "real concerns" of "real people" rather than merely the concerns of "well heeled" political lobbies such as the "free traders," the medical profession, the militant feminists, the gay and lesbian alliance, the black and Hispanic caucuses, the environmental movement, etc.
There is a great amount of latent support for people like Patrick Buchanan in the American heartland. Despite all the efforts and even political trickery of the current political elites and the news media to "stomp out" this kind of grass roots "populism" before it gets up a head of steam, Buchanan and people like him are receiving wide spread acceptance among white, middle class voters. More ominously, their messages are being echoed in American churches not only in the Bible belt, but in suburban evangelical and Catholic neighborhoods throughout the country - and it’s slowly being translated into votes.
For instance, several years ago David Duke, a former Klansman and an avowed racist, carried 60 percent of all white voters in Louisiana - an overwhelming majority of white voters - in his bid for a U.S. Senate seat. Duke was only stopped by a massive black and liberal white turnout whipped up into near hysteria by the press and the national leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties. How long such a shaky alliance can hold against the rage of Middle America is anyone’s guess.
Since then, Duke has receded into the background; but it would be a mistake for the establishment to conclude that the threat has vanished along with Duke, and to believe that such a result could only occur in a state like Louisiana. There will be others - not just in Louisiana - many of whom will not possess the "heavy racial baggage" of overt bigotry with which Duke was saddled as a result of his past - but who will, nonetheless, be every bit as dangerous.
And just how dangerous is that? George Will and Sam Donaldson asked William Bennett that question; Bennett’s answer was that it all smacked of "neo-fascism." [43]
Phillips - like Will, Donaldson and Bennett - believes that both political parties (not just the Republican) had better wake up before its too late - and that if it doesn’t, it could face a populist challenge which may be more powerful than they can now possibly envision - one which, if properly organized, could very well sweep them all from power; and that this could occur just as surely as other "establishment elites" in other countries have been swept away under similar conditions. The elite’s blindness to this possibility is startling. Dr. Merry goes on to say: "Not since the turmoil of the late 1960s ... has the faith (of ordinary people) in ... (their) political, (cultural and economic) establishment receded to such a low ebb." [44]
Yes, the flames of middle class rage are spreading, and they are being accelerated by the tinder of religion and the acerbic populism of Pat Buchanan.
When this has happened in the past, the result for secularists, Jewish groups and others who found themselves "left out" of the new Weltanschauung was disastrous.
And more than that, the result of all this to real Christians can itself only be deleterious. A thousand years will not suffice to wipe away the shame of Nazism from the German Church, and what happened to German Christianity can also happen to us. We are wrong to think otherwise.
Finally, we need to realize that today's populism is not necessarily tied to the fate of Pat Buchanan. The movement which Buchanan heads is not a top to bottom movement, but one which is structured from bottom to top. In other words, it is being driven from the grassroots up. Whatever happens to Buchanan will in the long run have very little effect on the movement itself. Nor will the movement be necessarily thwarted by the outcome of the 1996 presidential election. Whatever happens to Buchanan, the movement itself will continue. Why? - because the cultural and economic rage which is driving it will not be - indeed, cannot be - assuaged by the cultural and economic nostrums offered by the elites in either the Democratic or Republican parties.
Someday, someone with real charisma will seize this rage for themselves, and by doing so, capture control of this country, and ipso facto, the Western World. God help us all then.
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