Mr Steve Fraser’s book, “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power,” is a thoughtful investigation into something that has puzzled me: why are most Americans today seemingly so accepting of the economic and political inequities of our own time when, in stark contrast, similar conditions 100 years ago aroused widespread passionate debate, substantial resistance and creative actions?

His study yields an intriguing melange of cultural, economic, political and labor history that reveals how, in so many ways, both the early 21st century and the period of the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries share many things in common: first, a wide and growing gap between the wealthiest elite and the vast majority of Americans; second, persons of extreme wealth who — in league with mega-corporations and with the cooperation of compliant state and federal legislators — are able to define what is acceptable public policy and what is not; and, third, a threatened middle class struggling to maintain adequate income in order to surmount ill health, unemployment, and poverty in old age.

Striking differences

Despite these shared characteristics, however, we can also identify some key and striking differences.

First, by the 1950s, it was apparent that the previous 80 years of struggle had succeeded in ameliorating many of the greatest inequities that had originally caused public outrage and demands for reform. It appears that this has led many to conclude that no further major readjustments to our economic or political system are necessary.

Second, the nature of work, and the understanding of labor, had changed dramatically. Workers in the Gilded Age were largely laborers — whether in factories of manufacturing, clothing workshops or mines. Today, however, while some physical labor certainly remains, white collar employees — together with vastly expanded health, financial, and service industries — are much more typical of what is still quaintly referred to as the “work force.”

Third, from the 19th century through the 1930s and 1940s people recognized others as being in the same boat as themselves and, therefore, they engaged in shared efforts. By the latter part of the 20th century, however, most Americans had become severely atomized — so imbued with the ideologies of individualism and the market-economy — that they no longer easily experienced affinity towards others outside their immediate family or workplace.

Mr. Fraser devotes the first half of his book to exploring the “long nineteenth century of class warfare,” making it a rich resource for anyone seeking a better understanding of the chaotic mix of conflicting ideologies, economic distress and social and political upheavals that so consumed the United States in the latter years of the 19th century.

As he traces the political responses to the problems of class, wealth, and power imbalance from the 1870s through the Populist and Progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the New Deal in the 1930s, he notes the creative vision and vital spirit that were so central to, and characteristic of, those efforts. But something happened as a consequence of World War II. That devastating catastrophe appears to have had spiritually exhausting consequences. Something vital was lost.

That this was not immediately evident was due to the economic and social consequences of the Great Depression and the Second World War. As Thomas Piketty pointed out in last year’s seminal Capital, one of the notable effects of those years was to substantially diminish the pre-war wealth of the rich elites.

An expanded middle class

Also, at war’s end, employment soared, wages for the average citizen rose dramatically and the West entered its golden age of prosperity (roughly, 1947-1970). An expanded middle class enjoyed increased educational opportunities, plentiful jobs offering good wages with supplementary benefits and modern conveniences that afforded increased leisure time. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the great civil rights struggle that began in the late 1950s effectively marked the end of the almost century-long effort towards greater social and economic justice.

By the late 1970s, even as economic disparities began to grow anew, the long-lasting wave of progressive economic and political reform had clearly subsided, overcome by the apparently inescapable nature of the new “reality.”

The 1960s initiated a transformation of the object of change and reform, from being a community-oriented outcome to much-diminished, personal quests.

With surprising speed, Americans abandoned the solidarity of shared struggle in order to embrace the illusory joys of the “me generation.”

Undermined solidarity

How this transformation occurred is the focus of the second half of Fraser’s book where he does a brilliant job of peeling back layers of culture to identify key social and ideological changes — many of them subtle and seemingly unrelated — that have unfolded since the heady days of the New Deal. Their combined effect served to first blunt, and then undermine, the old reform impulse and, with it, the bonds of shared solidarity without which group action of any kind is impossible.

Fraser observes that it is a curious fact that our current political discussion is focused largely on the past, as centrist and progressive politicians fight to preserve the legacy of the New Deal (including Social Security and Medicare) while the Right pushes to “repeal it and replace it with something older ... flinty individualism of the free market, the disciplinary regime of the work ethic, the preeminence of business, and the reassurances of old-time patriarchal morality.”

Unlike our forebears in the 19th century, we seem to have lost the ability to imagine an alternative future significantly different than our present. We are so thoroughly imbued with the encircling wall of capitalism’s market-centrist ideology that we cannot imagine peering over it to consider other possible arrangements.

And, without an alternative, compelling vision, what kind of rallying cry is even possible? Where do we go from here?

In a future article, I will offer some thoughts on this vital question.

The author has been a college teacher of American history and political science; he served as a member of the Iowa State House of Representatives, and retired from public service in the Iowa executive branch in 2004.