Tomorrow is my 81st birthday (the start of year no. 82). This is is my 375th blog post. I started early last year, because I wanted some practice. The question always looming was whether I would continue doing this after I turned 81 and, if so, what to do about the title, which will be outmoded. I actually like doing this – it does sort of anchor my day, so for now, it will continue. And the title, too, will continue – I have no idea how to change it and keep the same blog.

I read an article this morning on the Atlantic Magazine website, by Roge Karma (I have no idea who he is; I assume “he”), titled “Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History”, which I highly recommend to you. It seems to me that about 75% of the articles I read are not worth reading, about 20% are and give me some new insight, and about 5% seem brilliant. This is one of the brilliant ones.

I am not going to repeat everything he said by any means, but I do want to say what I got out of it. And this is my interpretation of his conclusions – he might find fault with what I am writing here. And I am certainly leaving a lot out.

Basically, he is suggesting that the United States was doing just fine, with each generation doing better economically than the previous one, until the mid-1960s, basically the Lyndon Johnson years. And, I don’t think he is bashing Johnson – he is just looking at some inflection points that occurred in the ’60s. One was the passage of civil rights legislation and the other the Vietnam War.

Until the civil rights laws were passed, white America was doing just fine, working hard, happy with Democratic governments that supported them, helped by strong unions, happy with increasing benefits and even the economic elite were not overly complaining about the high tax rates on their marginal income. Then, the government changed its focus, and began focusing on the racial minorities, especially the Black minority. The white working class felt abandoned and resentful, and became easy prey for the silent majority, southern white strategy developed by the Republicans that slowly, then quickly, convinced them to abandon the Democratic party.

Similarly, the Vietnam War saw the rise in influence of the educated elite, the university students, who made it respectable to badmouth the government, to stage visible protests against it, thus further alienating those working whites who by and large supported the military and the war, and who were more afraid of Communism than those left-wing, Marxist educated college students.

Both of these things led to the resurgence of the Republican party. Until then the Republican party was the home of the financial elite, the home of old American money. Nixon was the first Republican beneficiary of all of this, but he was still a believer in the old economy, so the government itself didn’t change much during his abbreviated presidency, no during Ford’s. And would have stayed the same during the Carter years and perhaps even thereafter, had it not been for the Arab oil boycott and resulting inflation.

With Ronald Reagan, however, the wealthy, establishment Republicans saw their opportunity to convince their new allies, the white working class, that what the white working class needed (in effect to guard against Black encroachment) was to lower the upper income tax rates, to create a rising tide which would raise all ships.

Unfortunately, this trickle down economic system never worked, and income distribution became more and more skewed, but the working class whites were convinced this was because of governmental interference, and that if the economy was truly set loose all would be well.

Today this division seems set in stone – in spite of so far failing attempts by the Biden administration to support unions and to talk like they are supporting the country’s working class, who are desperate to eliminate governmental controls as much as possible (thus, emphasis on free speech, and gun rights and all the rest), and who have become so gullible that the far right crazies have been able to gain so much influence, and who seem to be threatened so many historic American democratic conventions. At the same time, the educated classes, and especially the younger members of that class, have themselves moved into a new “woke”, post-modern direction, further alienating themselves from the working class.

And there we are today. In a terrible place.

I probably didn’t begin to do this article justice, so don’t rely on my analysis. Read it yourself.

In the meantime, I am getting ready for my birthday celebration. What will it encounter? I am not telling you, except to say that I have concluded that taking my family and all of my subscribers on a round-the-world cruise will not work this year. So you can unpack your bags.

Maybe next year.