A LAMENT FOR THE AMERICAN HIGH.

In "The GOP and the Corporate Dems Can’t Red-Bait Their Way Out of a Reckoning," Thom Hartmann argues that the recent successes of so-called democratic socialists in Democrat primaries are another spin on Making America Great, "again" optional.

Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.

That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.

Americans have wanted those things for a very long time.

Put "on one income" in that first sentence and you might be writing about what I call The America That Worked^(TM) or perhaps the American High, which was designed away by Wise Experts.  "I devote a lot of space to documenting the ways in which the Trendy and the Deep Thinkers destroyed The America That Worked^(TM), supposedly in the interest of Social Progress or Inclusion or something similarly high-minded."

Mr Hartmann did put in that "one income."  I hope he doesn't get read out of the "progressive community" for that observation.  The rest of it is the standard false religion.

Franklin Roosevelt built the scaffolding of it with the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson finished the second story with the Great Society, and for about three decades we actually had it. The middle class in the postwar years grew faster and richer than any middle class in the history of the world. By 1980, it was two-thirds of us with a single paycheck (it’s about 41% now, and takes two paychecks to get there).

I grew up inside that promise. My father came home from the antifa war (aka WWII); got a job in a unionized tool-and-die shop in Michigan; and on that one paycheck he and my mother raised four boys, bought a house, kept a car in the driveway (new every three years), had a pension when he retired that let him travel the world, and never once feared that a hospital bill would take the whole thing down.

Nobody we knew was rich, but almost everybody we knew was secure. That security was the whole point, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the country decided, through its government, to make it happen.

No.  First, "I'm on record as skeptical of the entire arc of the Democrats' technocracy.  'Perhaps the simpler explanation is that the New Deal failed as a macroeconomic policy.'"  Second,  "Come the later set of ambitious programs, Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) opted to go to prison rather than be called up, the Great Society and Model Cities came to naught, and now the states continue to hope for federal grants to resurface the interstates."

That promise?  Those union jobs in Michigan, producing cars that wore out in four years?

[P]art of the victory dividend resource curse was the expectation, irrespective of your political stance, that the objective conditions for continued prosperity would always be with us.  We see that in the pop-culture treatment, early in the Reagan years, of former hippies entering middle age as yuppies.  It's more subtle than that, as there were more young people who had a bourgeois bent, despite all the efforts of the academic culture of the era to make bourgeois a dirty word, than there were smelly hippies, but yes, the hippies and the long-haired radicals had the idea there would be enough of the productive economy to sustain them once they got bored with their crusades.

Until there wasn't.  That the intellectual culture of the American High trashed the popular culture of the American High only whipped up the discontent.  "It's possible that Serious Thinkers will lump the optimistic ballads of the late Forties and early Fifties, along with the tract houses and the family formation, as a collective suppression of post-traumatic stress disorder, and it took the Kingston Trio and Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley to call attention, in varying ways, to the fractures that were always there."

The ongoing takeover of the Democrats by the protest constituencies in the cities is less about singing Happy Days are Here Again and more about continuing the immiserization of the party's base.

Regular readers are familiar with my suggestions that the victory dividend leading to the American High might have functioned much like a resource curse, that Democrat politicians in poor neighborhoods benefit more from the continued destitution of their voter base than they do from those voters prospering, and recently I've been suggesting that the Ruling Class might be more interested in protecting their position than in fostering conditions conducive to people improving their condition.

Meanwhile, for all Mr Hartmann's fulminations about how tough life is in These United States, the People will do just fine, and the technocrats and socialists can pound sand.  "'American exceptionalism,' properly understood, is a quarter millennium of self-governance, and it's resilient enough to put, successively, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden in the presidency and yet we persevere, and the humble mac and cheese has become five cheese penne."