Wayne O'Leary

End of the Republican Era

The Green New Deal, Medicare for All, enhanced Social Security, and the national wealth tax are all on hold. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, these progressive agenda items (and a number of others besides) will not be addressed any time soon. Literal survival is the name of the game for now and probably for the next year or two, as the existential crisis of our time works itself out.

Nevertheless, a better day is coming. The Republican-dominated era we’ve been living through for the better part of 40 years is coming to a close. As the cycles of history impose their will, a new progressive era is on the cusp of being born.

GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knows this is true. It’s why he’s so desperate to force as many conservative judicial appointments as possible through the congressional confirmation process before January 2021, cementing what he considers his legacy — enough right-wing jurists to block any significant liberal legislation for the next generation. In McConnell’s mind, that mission far exceeds in importance the battle against COVID-19 or the fate of its victims.

Mitch, like most Republicans, shares in the party consensus laid out by the Trump White House, which suggests the way out of the intractable pandemic/recession is to blithely accept nationwide fatalities of between several hundred thousand and one or two million as the justifiable price of swiftly opening the economy. These avoidable deaths, products of a kind of suicidal Pickett’s Charge against the coronavirus, are to be saluted as “warrior” casualties in the epidemiological struggle; we will briefly acknowledge those who involuntarily sacrifice their lives on the altar of free enterprise, then write them off as a cost of doing business and move on to more important things, such as boosting the stock market.

The country has gone off on such extreme ideological tangents before, minus the mortality statistics. Inevitably, the intrinsic greed, selfishness, and mind-bending stupidity they represented eventually terminated the conservative eras that spawned them. It happened at the end of the 19th century, when the long post-Civil War reign of the “robber barons” was replaced by the Progressive era. It happened again in 1932, when the Republican decade of the Roaring Twenties gave way to the liberal Democratic New Deal. It’s about to happen once more, accelerated by the mishandling of the pandemic.

Each of the earlier conservative epochs shared characteristics in common with the waning days of the one about to slip into history: a belief in untrammeled capitalism and leadership by business interests, a quashing of labor and workers’ rights, a contempt for government and the public sector, corruption in high places, vast levels of socioeconomic inequality, and irresponsible individualism at the expense of shared communal values.

The old regimes also betrayed similarly obtuse patterns of thought, personified by Herbert Hoover’s solemn declaration six months into the decade-long Great Depression that employment would rebound of its own accord within 60 days, eliminating any need for countervailing federal-government leadership against the crisis. It sounds remarkably like Trump rejecting pleas to take command in response to the coronavirus-induced recession of 2020 on the grounds that the pandemic will fade away by itself without tests or vaccines, while lost jobs will reappear “very soon” — maybe by the end of the year.

Both men put the blame for their predicaments on external forces. Europe was the cause of the Depression, said Hoover; China is the cause of the pandemic, says Trump. Both presidents pursued fanciful solutions. For Hoover, it was the gold standard; for Trump, it’s medical quackery and bogus cures. And for both occupants of the Oval Office, government — especially the federal government — was not the answer to their dilemmas; business, the bigger the better, would suffice, especially if given sufficient tax cuts and TLC.

There are echoes of the concern in prior conservative eras for the welfare of those at the top of the economic pyramid in the current government’s open-wallet relief policies regarding a corporate sector in questionable distress. Today, Washington dispenses subsidies, something absent in Herbert Hoover’s day, but the principle is the same: those that have get. A good example of this biased largesse is the way America’s airlines, the preferred mode of travel for our upper classes, were taken care of in the $2.2 trillion CARES Act.

At GOP insistence, a quarter of the March rescue package ($500 billion) was earmarked for corporate America, which lobbied heavily for federal aid despite a decade of unparalleled profits and soaring stock values, plus a gargantuan tax cut in 2017. The nation’s major airlines, led by Delta, American, United and Southwest, received $50 billion (or 10%) of the advance bailout, half in outright grants and half in low-interest Treasury loans.

This estimated eight-month financial cushion against anticipated recessionary losses requires no inconvenient government equity stake in the respective airlines (unless a loan exceeds $100 million) and allows 10 years for loan repayment. The recipients must retain their work forces (though only through September), and temporarily refrain from executive pay raises and shareholder dividend payments, but for an industry that devoted $19 billion of its extravagant GOP tax rebate over the past three years to wastefully repurchasing stock, it’s not a bad deal.

According to Transportation Department records, the carriers in question made a combined profit of $25.6 billion as recently as 2015, while squeezing $7.8 billion out of their passengers in inflated baggage and reservation fees, enough to enable them to distribute $10.5 billion to their investors.

Nevertheless, our public-spirited airlines, which were deregulated in 1978-82, have steadfastly refused government requests to help prevent pandemics by collecting passenger health data and contact information - - too expensive and time-consuming, they say. Yet, they can afford to offer special perks and incentives to the high-rolling “frequent fliers” and “status-holders” who make up just 12% of air passengers, but account for two-thirds of all air-travel miles — and whose desires are really behind the airline bailout.

In fact, over half of Americans (53% in 2017, says the International Council on Clean Transportation) don’t fly at all, even in good times. They’re among the majority suffering firsthand the effects of the Trump administration’s corporate-centered response to the pandemic recession, a majority almost certain to shortly write finis to four decades of Republican misrule. And not a moment too soon.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2020

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