Will Only Another Great Depression Save America?

Americans are increasingly aware that the Great American Century is over. A November 2010 Rasmussen poll found that just over one-third (37 percent) of respondents believe America's best days are still ahead. Sadly, nearly half (47 percent) say the nation's best days are in the past. They wonder what will come next.

Officially, the Great Recession started in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. Unofficially, the living recession grinds on with millions of Americans remaining unemployed and underemployed, millions continuing to lose their homes due to foreclosure, and millions more joining the legion of the homeless, hungry and those without health care. The U.S. is today marked by second-rate health care, educational and telecommunication systems.

The question haunting America is simple: if the American Century is over, what comes next? Will only another Great Depression save America?

* * *

The American Century was, symbolically, predicated on the Ozzie and Harriet myth of suburban home ownership; the popping of the housing bubble precipitated the Great Recession. As the myth of home ownership evaporates, the American Century ends.

In their important new book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson paint a grim picture of the nation's present state of affairs.

The authors, political science professors from Yale and Berkeley, respectively, critically assess the current situation. "The Wall Street of well-heeled bankers are thriving," they note, "while the Main Street of ordinary workers struggled amid the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression." They detail how, since the early '80s, the U.S. has "drifted away from a mixed-economy cluster and traveled a considerable distance toward another: the capitalist oligarchies" of Latin America.

They provide four valuable insights.

First, the current crisis is the result of four decades of economic and social restructuring driven by the demands of the rich and super-rich, especially the financial services sector, to capture more of the nation's wealth.

Second, this capitalist class has effectively taken control of the political process, capturing the Republican party and, to a lesser extent, the leadership of the Democrats as well.

Third, they have built a well-financed operation of think-tanks, lobbyists, astroturf shills, co-opted consumer groups, obsequious religious leaders, media bloviators and regulatory bureaucrats to make their message America's shared, self-evident truth.

And fourth, as a result of the first three factors, ordinary Americans, who they identify as the middle class, have not only lost their economic shirts, but their political influence and interest in politics as well.

Corporate capitalism has, over the last three decades, transformed America. Finance capital has come to dominate and manufacturing has been relocated from America's heartland to the lowest-paid machilador zones scattered across the globe. Corporatist policies, facilitated through federal tax, subsidy, trade and other programs, have left Detroit and other once-proud urban centers sinkholes of 21st-century underdevelopment.

Hacker and Pierson argue that the current economic crisis is really a political struggle between the rich and the rest of us. They document the process by which social wealth has been systematically expropriated by the rich from the American multitude. Ever so tasteful, the authors refuse to call this process "class war." However, the wealth of information they muster and their careful analysis makes it impossible to draw any other conclusion. America is in the grips of a bitter class war and the American people are losing.