Scare in policing the edges of american politics. Today, we will be looking at kind of the rest of the political landscape, beginning to look at what people refer to as the liberal consensus of the and 1950s and work through what 1940s is happening in terms of the main thoroughfare of american politics, possibilities , Political Action and the way , people are thinking about politics in america in the 1940s and 1950s. You had three readings, all of which deal with the idea of political ideology and which share a set of assumptions about the way ideas matter to politics. Today abouthinking how they kind of framed those ideas and this is a transition class where we move from discussing the geopolitics of the cold war and the red scare into discussing what else is happening in america in the 1940s and 1950s. Shall we start with daniel bell, everybodys favorite reading from today . I assume there are very few questions about this one. Yeah . So is he essentially saying that like the political ideology is not worth it anymore and the new kind of like focusing on Economic Issues and the government and making the country the best it can possibly be the best way to go . Prof. Lebovic that is a nice summary of a complicated argument. Ideologies political of the 1930s have run their course for their out of steam and really politics is about management, the adjustment of other things within a kind of general consensus. You know, thinking about the argument little bit, it is an argument people have made at various times in history. Have you read he makes a similar argument in the 1990s it is an argument that keeps , coming back. The 1950s if you are going to make that kind of argument, the 1950s is not a bad place to do it. This is written in 1960. This is bell. He was born daniel polonsky, a child of jewish immigrants in new york. Goes to city college in new york, back when city college was free. Which is a nice thought. People could spend a lot of time sitting in the cafeterias are arguing politics. You are probably not talking about socialism and the spanish civil war in the way bell and his friends were. He constantly frames issues in these large sweeping historical frames. He said the big ideologies of the 19th century had run out of steam. What is ideology for him . Remember the section where yes . [inaudible] prof. Lebovic social levers. Great. What the hell does that mean . You dont know. That is exactly the point i have for you. It is an interesting question. I thought it was interesting , social movements, you have to simplify your ideas. Cant be up in the clouds. It has to be real, cant even cross what they like, whats in it for me . And then he established the truth, not just something that is an idea. It is the truth it is reality. , going into the action, getting people going. Philosophical and get them into reality to get people on board. Prof. Lebovic terrific. These are the concepts we need to flesh out what ideology is. It is turning ideas into action. The way you do it is in the three steps he pointed out. You have to simplify the idea make a claim about it being , truthful to the world and then using that typified idea provide , your framework to act in the world and make decisions about what to prioritize, what to emphasize, what deals you can make, what compromises are allowed, and what are not. So this framework which he said has to appeal to emotion. It is not just sitting in a room. It had to speak to the way you live to get you moving in the world. This framework was an example of an ideology. Any of the big isms will help. Communism, capitalism, fascism. Environmentalism, socialism, feminism. If you run through all of those and think about where they are in the 1950s, most of them are not very operative. Socialism and the american landscape are not very popular in the 1950s. There were american fascists, they have been discredited by the 1940s for obvious reasons. Feminism, where is feminism at in the 1950s . It is in a kind of lull. We will talk in later classes what is going on but people talk , about it in terms of a first wave in the early 20th century focused on Voting Rights and the second wave in the 1960s and 1970s. Environmentalism isnt really on the scene yet in a meaningful way. There is actually kind of a lull. What about religion . Is religion and ideology . In bells terms . He has kind of slippery on where religion fits on that. He getsguage is where less simple. In some ways, and ideology is a secular and about action in the world. You take ideas and act on the basis of them, whereas religion, what are you supposed to do with the ideas . Are you supposed to change the world . What are you supposed to do with religious ideas . Prepare for the inevitable. Prof. Lebovic who do you change . Yourself. Prof. Lebovic yourself. For him, religion is a framework that encourages adaptation of of the self for eternal truths rather than changing the world , in the vision of how it should be better. So he begins by saying the big 19thcentury philosophies are what take the place of religion when religion goes away. And then there is a kind of , lingering version of religiosity which is like an ideology because it is about changing the world. I dont think he can decide what to think about religion. I think the reason for that is the framework hes got is a secular one. Religion has gone away. It will be replaced by secular ideologies. He is confronted with a problem in america in the 1950s, which is america is becoming more religious in the 1950s. People belong to a church. Up to 69 by 1959. There is an expansion in religiosity and trying to work out what thats about is a difficult question. It has an impact on politics, most notably in god we trust is added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954 and in 1955 , in god we trust is added to the currency. It had not previously been in the currency but now it is a symbol of a new respect for the heart of american political culture. If you had to take a simple guess at why there is more of religion in america in the what 1950s, would you think . [inaudible] prof. Lebovic right, to distinguish religious american liberalism from godless atheistic communism. There is a kind of clash going on. The problem with the argument is one historians have made if you , are someone who believes in religion, which i am very secular, but if you believe in religion, you dont think you come to a higher belief in god in the because it is helping 1950s america prove a point. Against the communists. Religion is something very personal, working out why that evolves historically at different times is difficult. So he has this idea that the big ideologies have gone away a little bit. What is left is kind of a consensus around managerial issues. What are those . Section on 373, when he talks about the welfare state, the mixed economy, and political pluralism. I want to spend most of todays class talking about mixed economy. Do you know this phrase . Mixed economy . No is a fine answer to the question. No, not particularly . To understand what he is talking about, you need to think about how people thought about economics in the 19th century. Stay with me a little bit. I know when we talk about economics, it is not your favorite part of this class. Economics is interested in you if you are not interested in it. In the 19th century, how is the economy supposed to work . In what is called the classical era . How many of you have done microeconomics . How does the class start in micro . What do you look at first . Years ago . The chart that looks Something Like this . That sound familiar . What is that . Supply and demand. Prof. Lebovic what is the supply demand chart measuring . How much, how many goods there are and the relationship between the two. Prof. Lebovic and where they intersect is where the demand and supply work each other in relation to each other and will determine the price and that will determine how things are distributive the end and economy. Is this roughly your understanding of how supply and demand works . The idea is it is selfregulating, what adam smith calls the invisible hand of the market. Demand and supply will meet each other. That will be a way to work out how the economy should work and it should balance itself. It becomes sustainable and optimize the economy generally for everybody. Through the 19th century, that is considered liberal economics. Laissezfaire economics. Free economics. The only problem is they have repeated crashes and depressions in the late 19th and early 20th century. 1873, 1890s, 1929. A lot of economists who think of themselves as liberals begin to question the assumption of how the economy should work. The most significant of them for our purposes is john maynard keynes, who in the interwar period begins investigations. As opposed to focusing on microeconomics he focuses on , macroeconomics, focusing on how the system should work. If you take the introductory economics course, in the 1950s, 1960s, you would not start with supply and demand, which is how microeconomics starts. You start with, how the how does the mechanism works in isolation for the macroeconomics starts with in isolation. You need to set that up before you can have capital. Operating on the traditional theory. The big interventions that keynes makes in 1936, his magnum opus is saying what matters most to the economy is aggregate demand. How much demand overall there is, not any eventual deciding any individual deciding what price is on things but how much purchasing power there is in the economy overall. It is more easily understood with 1940s political cartoons. The top is an economy where there are very few wages being paid to workers. People who are selling products and taking high profits, not paying many wages, which means the taint of purchasing power is low. People dont have money to buy products so there is a smaller market to sell to and it gets to produce less. The bottom image, more wages are being paid out. You can tip those wages into the tank or purchasing power, more people with more money to buy more things you can put people , into production and the economy can grow. This is a similar representation for the same idea. You have to spend to kick things into operation. Once people are spending it will , go back to the worker and become a virtual circle. Questions about this . Any questions . The key challenge is how do you make sure there is enough purchasing power in the economy . On one hand, you need to regulate the market to make sure workers are being paid sufficient wages and there is not a disequilibrium. The second thing is the government can actually act to stimulate demand when there is an economic downturn. At the moment when there is less demand because people are getting forced out of work, the government can spend to create jobs. This is the kind of intervention of the new deal. You dont balance the books you , act aggressively to spend to kick this process into motion again. This will become the orthodoxy of economics in the 1940s and 1950s, to the point that by the 1960s, Time Magazine will put keynes on the cover. This is kind of the consensus. Does it make sense . There are some reasons to think that bell is onto something when he is focusing on this idea of a mixed economy, not entirely staterun or free, but where the a market economy where the state intervenes. How does the state get its money today . Taxation. This is the chart of the amount of americans paying federal income tax every year. The top line is a percentage of the workforce. The bottom line is a percentage of the population. There is a massive spike during what . World war ii . Prof. Lebovic during world war ii. 26 filed income tax in 1940. 87 in 1946, and it stays after the war as a kind of norm. The other thing that will be surprising to you is these are the top marginal tax rates in the period. The top earners in the 1950s are paying . 90 on the dollar. Not that many people, but that is a high tax rate to redistribute and take the wealth and put it back into general circulation. The big drop that happens in two steps comes in which decade . 1980s. Prof. Lebovic 1980s, the reagan tax cuts. We talk a lot about the margin of tax rate. If you take history margins the chances of being in the top margin are not as high as i wish they were. I dont want you to focus on the details. The middle. If you look at the kind of 5000, 8000, 10,000 range spikes as , well in 1942, up from 8 to 40 tax. The top is being taxed a lot more, but the middle is being taxed a lot more. The amount of taxes being gathered and spent is an indicator that there is much more of a mixed economy in the u. S. In the 1950s. The second is that in many ways we have had a long period of workingclass agitation that we have talked about in the course violent strikes through , the 1930s. In 1946, there is another wave of strikes at the end of the war. Something like 4 million workers go on strike in the militancy of 1946. The Labor Movement looks like it will continue as people demand higher wages. My favorite example is the tugboat workers in new york city go on strike, which shut the city down because no fuel can get into new york. The city is stopped. This image of new york totally depended on tugboat workers. Early 1950s and bite daniel bell will comment, but 1960, the working are pretty happy. They are not going on strike anymore. People who want to change things are the intellectuals. It is not the working class anymore. Part of the reason for that because of changes to labor law, and because there are a set of agreements and the late 1940s and 1950s, the workingclass are offered better turns for work. The key example is called the treaty of detroit in 1950, which is an agreement between the united automobile workers and General Motors that will apply across the auto sector. A leading sector of the economy. The deal is basically in , exchange for guarantees to go on strike less frequently to recognize the need for production, the union will get cost of living adjustments, so the wages will increase with inflation, pension plans, and Health Insurance and they will be looked after as part of the middle class. At that point, militancy calms down. The workers have the Consumer Power they need to keep the economy rolling. Lets have a bigger pie for everybody and we will have less conflict. The third example i will give you to show there is emerging consensus around this idea of a mixed economy is the fact the , Political Parties are really confusing to people in the 1950s. This is a cartoon from 1957. The joke is what, how are you supposed to tell what the difference is between a republican and democrat, which , i imagine, this sounds like it comes from outer space at this point, given polarization. The parties are complicated in the 1930s. 1940s. Each party has an internal Division Within it. The democrats have a kind of urban based on , workingclass votes and africanamerican votes. In the south, the Democratic Party is the party of white supremacy. They dont work very well together. The republicans are divided between what were called liberal republicans, progressive republicans in the northeast, and conservative in the south and west. Voting doesnt happen in the way you would think of it. There are weird coalitions forming. There is a key sign politics is closer together in this period than today, in 1952 the democrats and republicans go to eisenhower and ask him to be their president ial candidate. With the partial exception of bloomberg today, it is hard for us to imagine any other candidate that both parties would be like, that person is good for us. No real difference here. And then eisenhower continues a lot of new deal programs around Government Spending in the economy and gets some flak from conservatives on his right flank and writes a letter back to them and says, should any Political Party attempt to abolish Social Security or a limited labor laws you will not hear of them party , again in our political history. The idea is that the new norm is a mixed economy. We have to continue some of these programs. There is a famous american Political Science article written in 1950 that says the american political system is falling apart because the parties are not polarized enough. We need to make the parties more polarized so voters have a clear indication when they go to the voting booth of which party they are voting for, which, i guess because for what you wish for is the answer. Any questions about this . Doing all right . Yes. Did the government have a lot more money . During the war, with these extra people working, a lot of that government money is being spent on ships and tanks and so forth. As soon as it was over, they had a [indiscernible] was it easier for government to intervene when they had all that money . Prof. Lebovic this is something i want to develop in the next part of the class. The key question we have talked about is the fact the government should intervene. We have not talked about what form it should intervene. There are lots of ways government can spend money to stimulate the economy. In the war, it was in wartime. One of the reasons keynesian economics is good during a war is you cant produce too much. The thing about producing bombs and planes is they cape they keep getting broken. People keep getting planes broken and you have to reproduce them. What that will look like in these times is more difficult. We will turn to that now, where is the money going . A good way to do that is to turn to schlesingers piece. Which hopefully was easier to make sense of. Although you did well with bell. Arguing there is a a consensus forming in american politics. He calls it the vital center. That is where we need to be, not too left and not too right. He makes a kind of hopeful argument, i think. We normally think of politics on a leftright spectrum. He tells us where this comes from. Where does the idea of calling progressive parties left and conservative parties might come from . The French Parliament during the revolution which is where the , people were sitting here that were sitting during those discussions that gives us a , leftright spectrum. This does not work anymore to make sense of politics. How come . They argue it is more of a circle. You cant really define communism from fascism on a traditional leftright scale. Andy leftright scale works more to the center, noncommunist left and nonfascist right. Prof. Lebovic if you keep going too far to the left, you end up taking away Property Rights and stepping on individual liberties. If you go too far to the right you do the same thing. ,if you go too far to either end, you come back around and it forms a circle and you end up at the bottom. This is an argument you should be familiar with. People have compared hitler and stal