This is the fifth in a series of five posts on a report issued by a study group convened by Opportunity America with the participation of the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution.  The previous four posts are as follows: “The white working class ignored” (12/3/2018); “The limits of bipartisanship” (12/5/2018); “Understanding the national turn of 1980” (12/10/2018); and “Empowering the working class” (12/12/2018).  Scroll down to find them; they are in reverse chronological order.
 
      The Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings report maintains that the political establishment has abandoned the working class in recent decades and has been more responsive to the needs of minorities, women, and gays.  This has provoked a turn to toward white nationalism and ultra-Rightist manifestations, of which the election of Donald Trump is an indication.  The report expresses concern for the hostile division between Left and Right; it believes that the nation may be becoming ungovernable.  The report recommends specific measures to increase the wages of low-waged workers.  It hopes to form a consensus among democrats, republicans, and the corporate elite in support of such measures.
 
      I have maintained that the members of the study group were driven by the political objective of rescuing the political establishment and enabling it to reassert its control over the nation.  I maintain that an analysis framed by defense of the interests of an elite class will arrive to a limited understanding.  In order to develop a universal understanding that does not reflect particular interests, one must encounter and listen to persons from different horizons, and especially important are the voices from below that emerge from the exploited classes and the dominated nations and people.  Driven by defense of particular political interests rather than by a desire to understand that creates a listening mode, the study group is unable to grasp the historical, national, and global factors that have led to the relative decline of the nation and that have fostered alienation among the people.  It is unable to discern the necessary steps for the renewal of the nation, including the need for the empowerment of the working class and other popular sectors.
 
      In this final post in the series, I maintain that the Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings report has a white-male-centered view of the nation and the world, which is reflected in the following. “For much of the nation’s history, [steady] work was easy to come by, without regard to background or education, and it gave workers and their families a respected and moderately secure standing in  American life” (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 61).  Such a reading of American history ignores historic patterns of racial and gender discrimination; its description is far more accurate for white workers than for women and blacks.  And it leaves aside the fact that economic opportunities were made possible by the conquest of indigenous nations and Mexican territory, and by the strategic commercial relations with the slave systems of the Caribbean and the South.
 
       The study group’s myopic reading of American history could not possibly see that the elimination of the most basic forms of discrimination in 1964 and 1965 came too late for the black working class.  It occurred just as the great industrial expansion of the nation was coming to an end.  Expanding industry had been central to the upward mobility of white ethnic groups, because good-paying jobs in factories, mines, and construction were available to white men with low levels of education during the 100 years following the Civil War.  Expanding industry enabled a multi-generational working class ascent to the middle class, because it provided the economic and social conditions for much higher levels of educational attainment by the children of the poorly educated but well paid white workers. However, with industrial expansion coming to an end by the 1960s, a similar pattern of upward mobility would not be available to working class or poor blacks, now that racial barriers were removed.  See “The abandonment of the black lower class” 6/24/2015 in the category Race in the USA.
 
      The elimination of basic discrimination in 1964-1965 would result in significant and highly visible gains for the black middle class over subsequent decades.  However, in the context of a changing economy, and with the absence of any national commitment to protecting the economic and social rights of the citizens of the nation, there emerged a greater class inequality within the black community.  In 1987, the sociologist William J. Wilson (1987) argued that a socially isolated black lower class had emerged.
 
      In this post 1965 period, identity politics emerged in resentful and angry reaction to surviving forms of prejudice and discrimination and the continuing white-male-centric narratives on American history.  But identity politics is an overreaction to these social sins, taking into account that they are much reduced from their pre-1965 manifestations; and it provokes division.  What is needed is a unifying reformulation of the American narrative, one that finds a dignified place for all, in the past and in the future, even as it fully acknowledges historic and contemporary social sins.
 
      With their myopic reading of the national story, it is not surprising that the members of the study group do not see the causal relation between the Western rise and colonial domination of the world.  It is clear that they have never heard the voiced of the colonized.  Accordingly, they cannot see the imperialist intentions of free trade (see OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 64).  And they do not understand that China’s state interventionist policies and its position on intellectual property (see OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 64) coincide with the concepts and demands that have been expressed by international organizations of Third World governments, such as the Non-Aligned Movement and the G-77.  China merely stands out because it is sufficiently strong to act in accordance with Third World principals.
 
      With the emission of the Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings report, the political establishment of the United States once again demonstrates that it is morally and intellectually unprepared to lead the nation in this historic moment of national challenge and global crisis.  Now is the time for the Left to join forces in order to seek to take political power, united on fundamental principles.  Such principals ought to include the necessary role of the state in protecting the social and economic rights of all citizens and in formulating a plan for national economic and social development, anti-imperialism in foreign policy, and structural reforms in the political process in order to bring to an end its control by the elite.

References
 
Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings Working Class Study (OA/AEI/BI).  2018.  Work, Skills, Community: Restoring opportunity for the working class.  (Opportunity America, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Brookings Institution).
 
Wilson, William J.  1987.  The Truly Disadvantaged.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

​     In my last post, I maintained that persons seeking to understand must place the desire to understand above all other desires, including the desire to preserve the economic advantages of one’s class or nation. In addition, I maintained that the American Opportunity/AEI/Brookings study group is motivated primarily by a desire to rescue the political establishment, rather than by a desire to understand.  Accordingly, it laments the turn from the social contract and its implications for provoking political instability, but it makes a limited effort to analyze the turn in historic national and global context.  (See “Understanding the national turn of 1980” 12/10/2018).
 
     An indication of the study group’s political objective is its call for the replacement of workers’ unions with work councils.  It maintains that unions are too adversarial, and that work councils, by contrast, are more collaborative, and they give workers a stake in running the company (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 63).  It acknowledges that unions once “checked the power of corporations” (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 10), thus facilitating the improvement of wages and working conditions; and that, accordingly, unions played a central role in the social contract.  In these acknowledgements, the study group implicitly is recognizing the role of power in protecting the social and economic rights of workers, and the importance of unions in providing workers with power.  However, inasmuch as the political objective of the study group is to conserve the power of the political establishment, it evidently seeks to disempower further an increasingly alienated working class; and it seeks to pacify the working class through concrete economic concessions.
 
     Nevertheless, the right course of action for the nation at the current historic junction is not rescuing the political establishment through the further disempowerment and the pacification of the working class.  Rather, the right course of action is the empowerment of the working class and other political sectors, through popular education that enables understanding of the nation’s problems in historical and global context; and that calls the people to the defense not only of their particular sectors but also of the nation and of humanity.
 
     The call of “power to the people” is as old as the nation itself; historically, various popular sectors sought to overcome restrictions on its power.  As is well known, the United States for many years severely restricted the power of the popular sectors by limiting the vote to men, whites, property holders, and the educated.  These restrictions gave rise to popular movements that were able to eliminate such barriers.  By the late 1960s, the universal franchise existed in practice, even if some problematic issues remained.  The universal franchise, in conjunction with the social contract, gave an image of a highly democratic nation.
 
     However, the works of the sociologist C. Wright Mills (1951) and the political scientist G. William Domhoff (1967; 1979) revealed the democratic image to be false.  They persuasively argued that that a political/economic/military elite comprised by 0.5% of the population effectively controlled the institutions of the nation, including the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.  This largely invisible phenomenon was made possible by the dependency of politicians on elite financial support and by elite controlled opinion shaping organizations that framed the issues of public debate.
 
     In the 1970s, the nation confronted stagflation, government debt, relative economic decline, and global anti-neocolonial movements of resistance.  In reaction, the power elite in the early 1980s acted decisively in defense of its short-term interests, ignoring the basic concrete human needs of the working class and the long-term wellbeing of the nation. And it was able to distort the public discourse in defense of its action.  With the popular sectors lacking the political power to prevent this turn, the fundamentally undemocratic character of the nation became manifest.
 
     Given the historic collaboration among Big Labor, Big Business, and government in the heyday of the social contract, it seems a bit disingenuous for the Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings Study group to refer to unions as adversarial.  It is true, however, that U.S. labor movement to a considerable extent has been combative in defense of workers’ interests.  But the adversarial relation between labor and management and between labor and government was driven by the aggressive attitude of management and government toward the rights of workers, which often has included resistance to unionization itself.
 
     However, regardless of the extent to which unions are adversarial, they are a necessary component of the empowerment of workers, and power is necessary, as the report implicitly acknowledges, for the protection of social and economic rights.  Accordingly, all workers, of all occupations and levels of education, should form unions, unifying all in each place of work; and they should elect their own leaders at the local level, who in turn elected delegates to speak in defense of workers in the society and before management and government.
 
     Strong unionization is not necessarily adversarial; it depends of a variety of factors.  In Cuba, for example, 99% of workers belong to a union; and the unions have a cooperative relation with management, government, and other popular sectors.  It is a situation of state ownership of companies, so that the government, controlled by the elected delegates of the people in a system of indirect elections, appoints the management.  Both government and management support unionization, and they seek cooperative relations with the union leadership, elected by the workers.  To be sure, management focuses on concrete goals with respect to production or providing a service, whereas as the unions focus more on wages and working conditions.  But this difference of interest occurs in a context in which the government is committed to both goals; and it expresses itself in the context of common commitment to larger goals, including the wellbeing of the people, the sovereignty of the nation, and the continuing development of the Revolution.  In Cuba, even educated workers in the professions belong to unions; they are organized in their places of work, united with non-professional staff.  It is a system of strong unionization, and it is far from adversarial.
 
     The genuine renewal of our nation requires various dimensions, but among them is renewed support for unionization, not only for workers with less than a college degree, but for all workers, including professionals.  Places of work provide an excellent locale for popular participation and popular education, which could include the development of a union culture of support for other popular sectors, for the long-term wellbeing of the nation, and in defense of humanity.  Inasmuch as the working class is now fifty percent white and fifty percent persons of color, unionization would help overcome racial divisions and prejudices.  Folks working together for their common good and for the good of the nation would experience that their prejudices disappear, for they would discover that human qualities, both good and bad, are well distributed across color lines.
 
     The unpatriotic and amoral conduct of the political establishment since 1980 makes clear the need for the people to take power from the political establishment through the formation of alternative political parties or political organizations.  An alternative political party can rise to power only through politically intelligent proposals; among them should be a call for the unionization of all workers.   Unions not only can defend the rights and interests of particular workers.  They also are a mechanism for generating popular participation and creating a revolutionary union culture that is committed to all popular sectors and to the good of the nation.

References

​Domhoff, G. William.  1967.  Who Rules America?  Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
 
__________. 1979.  The Powers That Be.  New York: Vintage Press.
 
Mills, C. Wright.  1956.  The Power Elite.  New York: Oxford University Press.
 
Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings Working Class Study (OA/AEI/BI).  2018.  Work, Skills, Community: Restoring opportunity for the working class.  (Opportunity America, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Brookings Institution).

​       A report issued by a study group convened by Opportunity America and cosponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution has maintained that the political establishment of the United States has turned its back on the working class in recent decades, giving rise to a turn to the ultra-Right by the white working class.  It calls for specific measures that would raise the wages of low-waged workers.  It seeks to form a bipartisan consensus in support of these measures, involving the two establishment political parties and the corporate elite.  I have maintained that the study group seeks to rescue the political establishment from the consequences of its abandonment of the nation and the people since 1980, and that its assumptions and political objectives could not possibly enable a genuine renewal of the nation.  (See “The white working class ignored” 12/3/2018 and “The limits of bipartisanship” 12/5/2018 in the category Public Debate in the USA).
 
      The report laments the retreat from the social contract (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 10-11), but it does not analyze the causes of the retreat.  Accordingly, it does not see that that social contract in the USA was not sustainable.  It was based in part on an arrangement between the large industrial corporations and Big Labor, in which management received exorbitantly high salaries and workers received high wages, making the prices of U.S. manufactured goods high in relation to competitors in the core and semi-periphery.  It also was based on social benefits financed by state deficit spending, which could work for a period, but ultimately the level of government deficits became too great to be sustainable.  And it was based, in addition, on the superexploitation of the neocolonized peoples of the semiperipheral and peripheral zones of the world-economy, which required increasingly high social control expenditures, as the peoples of the world rebelled and formed movements in opposition to the inequality inherent in these global structures.  When matters came to a head, the U.S. power elite abandoned its alliance with Big Labor and the people, and it took unpatriotic and anti-popular steps in defense of itself: deindustrialization, reduced taxes, reduced government social services, extorting profits from semi-peripheral and peripheral zones, and investment in financial speculation.  That it is to say, it abandoned the social contract and the popular sectors that it benefitted, when the inherent problems in the social contract became manifest. 
 
       The Opportunity America, AEI, Brookings study group, however, appears to understand none of this.  Why does it have such a limited understanding and analysis?  As a graduate student years ago, having encountered the fundamental differences in understanding between black scholars and white social scientists, which revealed the limited understanding of the latter, I became interested in epistemological questions.  How do people arrive to the understanding that they have?  Is anything approaching an objective understanding is possible?  This interest led me to a study of the cognitional theory of the Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan and of the epistemological method followed in practice by Marx (See McKelvey, 1991). 
 
     As a result of this investigation, I came to the conclusion that a universal understanding, affirmed as correct from a variety of cultural perspectives, is possible.  A universal understanding is not absolute or eternal, but it does have a high probability of being correct, enabling human action on its basis.  However, in order to arrive to such a universal understanding, the subject (the person seeking to understand) must place the desire to know above all other desires, including one’s economic interests.  In addition, the subject must be driven both to understand what is true and to do what is right.  Driven by a desire to understand, the subject above all must listen to others, taking seriously their understanding.  And with such a listening mode, the subject must seek personal encounter with persons from different horizons, cultures, nations, and perspectives.  Historical consciousness is a component of this, for the process includes encounter with the discourses of the past, left to us in the form of the written word.  Such listening and personal encounter leads to the discovery of relevant questions that previously were beyond consciousness, and this discovery leads to a deeper understanding, or even a transformation of understanding, moving the subject beyond the limited assumptions of a particular culture, nation, ethnic group, class, or gender.  Especially important is encountering the perspectives from below, particularly as expressed by the leaders and intellectuals of the social movements, past and present, of the exploited classes and the dominated nations and peoples.
 
       What are the implications of such a Lonerganian/Marxist epistemology for the issue at hand?  If we look at the abandonment of the social contract from the vantage point of the working class, we see that the social contract provided concrete benefits to the working class, but it could not prevent the historic national turn.  Evidently, the working class did have sufficient power to defend its interests.  At its height in 1953, union membership was only 36% of all workers (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 63).  Many of the unions pertained to Big Labor, which did not necessarily represent the interests of the worker; indeed, there were in the 1960s democratic reform movements within the big labor organizations.   At the same time, the power elite has controlled both establishment political parties, such that the working class, either by itself or in alliance with other popular sectors, did not have a political organization to facilitate the clear and unified expression of its political will.  So effective weapons of resistance were not present at the critical moment of the early 1980s.  A workers’ party, socialist party, or people’s party with effective presence in public debate did not exist, and the big unions were ill prepared for the historic turn. 
 
        An understanding of the limited power of the working class in the early 1980s invites further questions.  Why was the power of the working class so limited after so many years of working class movements and organizations?  Did the working class organizations during the course of the twentieth century give too much emphasis to concrete gains in wages and welfare, and insufficient attention to the political power of the working class?  What efforts were made in the past to empower the working class and other popular sectors?  Addressing these relevant questions would have required study of Marxist, socialist, and working class organizations and debates in the USA, beginning with the last quarter of the nineteenth century.  If such study had been driven by a desire to understand what is true, and not to defend particular interests, it would have led to a greater understanding of the factors that led to the limited power of the working class.  Said factors include the reformist cooptation of the labor movement, supported by the accommodationist orientation of its leaders, and aided by the repression of more revolutionary elements that were seeking workers’ empowerment. 
 
       An investigation of the disempowerment of the working class by various intellectuals and leaders committed to understanding what is true and doing what is right also would have resulted in the discovery of another relevant question of global scope.  To what extent were the structures of the world-system a factor in the abandonment of the social contract by the U.S. power elite?  Addressing this question would have led to the heart of the matter, namely, the inherent unsustainability of the social contract, as noted above.  The social contract pertained only to the nations of the North, and its material foundation was based on the superexploitation of vast semiperipheral and peripheral regions of the earth.  As the superexploited peoples of the earth acquired the capacity for social movements, they generated various forms of resistance, the control or containment of which would become increasingly too costly for core governments.  In addition, the benefits of the social contract were financed partially by state deficit spending, which could not be sustained in the long term.  Viewed from a global perspective, we can see that the social contract was nothing more than a temporary response to a political challenge from below, and it benefitted a minority of the world’s population at the expense of the majority.  It could not be sustained, either economically or politically, in the long term.  It had to be abandoned, in one way or another.  In response to a growing awareness of the unsustainability of the social contract during the 1970s, the U.S. power elite responded in a form that defended and promoted its short-term interests, leaving aside considerations for the well-being of the nation or of humanity, imposing its decision on the peoples of the nation and the world.
 
     The result, however, was that the working class sensed that it had been abandoned by the political establishment of the nation.  The white working class, previously for the most part in committed alliance with the political establishment, became increasingly alienated.  Not having a more scientifically informed political alternative available to them, some have turned to the ultra-Right, generating a situation of crisis for the political establishment, which fears that it is losing control and that the nation is perhaps becoming ungovernable.
 
      In response to this situation, the members of the Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings study group respond as representatives of the political establishment, seeking to restore its political and social control through concrete concessions to the working class.  The members of the study group have not placed the desire to understand what is true and do what is right above all other desires, including preserving personal privileges or protecting the interests of the elite.  They have not encountered persons of different cultures and perspectives, leading to the discovery of relevant questions that would challenge their assumptions and transform their understandings.  As a result, they are incapable of understanding the steps necessary for a genuine renewal of the nation.

References
 
McKelvey, Charles.  1991.  Beyond Ethnocentrism:  A Reconstruction of Marx’s Concept of Science.  New York:  Greenwood Press.
​
Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings Working Class Study (OA/AEI/BI).  2018.  Work, Skills, Community: Restoring opportunity for the working class.  (Opportunity America, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Brookings Institution).

       A report issued by a study group convened by Opportunity America, with the participation of the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, maintains that the political establishment has been indifferent to the needs of the working class in recent decades (see “The white working class ignored” 12/3/2018).  The report calls for a renewal of the social contract, on a foundation, above all, of higher wages for low-wage workers.  It maintains that the problem today is not lack of jobs, but jobs that pay less than what is needed to live; it therefore concludes that wages should be raised for low-waged workers.  The report proposes that private sector employers be encouraged to pay workers decent wages, through persuasion and tax incentives to employers; and it calls for government subsidies to low-income workers, through direct wage supplements or a worker tax credit (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 13-15, 67-73, 112).
 
      The members of the study group express their unanimous concern with the large size of the government debt, and accordingly, they formulate proposals that do not increase the budget deficit.  In order to pay for the costs of tax incentives to employers and tax credits or direct wage supplements to workers, the report proposes “taxing those on the winning side of growing economic inequality” (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 15).  It suggests three possible ways to raise tax revenues:  “expanding the number of families that pay estate taxes, limiting tax deductions available to better-off households or raising minimum taxes for corporations that rely on tax havens” (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 15).
 
     These are good proposals.  They involve the redistribution of money from corporations and the wealthy in order to provide those in need with the necessities of life.  They are the kind of measures that a socialist government, that is, a government whose levers are in the hands of delegates of the people, would enact.  They are the type of measures that a popular socialist party seeking to take political power would propose.
 
       However, the effectiveness of the proposals in improving the quality of life of the working class depends on their size and scope.  How great will the new tax revenues be, and how much additional money will be in the hands of low-wage workers?  In the U.S. political context, corporate interests finance the careers of politicians and the two major political parties, so the political system must respond to corporate interests, even as it pretends to defend the interests of the people.  Given the historic tendency of corporations to seek to set wages and taxes at a minimum level, one would expect that, if the proposals were to be enacted, they would be limited in size, although they would be useful for politicians pretending to defend the people.
 
     The report observes that persuasion should be effective with employers, because paying decent wages is in the interests of employers.  It is true that employers have a long-term interest in paying decent wages to all workers, for various reasons.  However, since 1980, the U.S power elite has demonstrated that, in the current historic moment of world-system structural crisis and national decline, it is prepared only to respond to the demands of its short-term profits.  In recent decades, the U.S. power elite has dismantled the industry of the nation, invested in finance rather than production, turned its back on the U.S. working class, imposed the neoliberal project on the peoples and nations of the world, launched aggressive wars in the Middle East, and demonized nations that seek an independent road.  The U.S. power has given little sign of concern for the well-being of the people and the nation nor of understanding its own long-term interests in global political stability and ecological sustainability.  It has given us little reason to believe that it could be persuaded that paying decent wages to its workers is in accordance with U.S. interests, and that it should comply with its patriotic duty.  If the U.S. power elite were ready today for such a turn toward popular needs and the good of the nation, there would have been more signs of it prior to now.
 
     Decades of indifference to the needs of the U.S. working class by the political establishment, and decades of aggression against the peoples of the world, should instruct us.  The U.S. power elite has demonstrated that it is morally and intellectually unprepared to lead the nation in the current historic juncture.  It can no longer be a question of persuading or pressuring the elite to take necessary steps.  The need for a restructuring of political power, forged from below, has become evident.  There is in the USA today need for a popular political and social movement that seeks to take political power, arriving to control the executive and legislative branches of government, without a debt or obligation to anyone other than the people and the nation.  In such a political context, the full implementation of the type of measures proposed by the report, with a size and scope necessary for accomplishing changes in the conditions of life of the working class, would be possible.
 
      The report maintains that the measures it proposes are capable of obtaining bipartisan support.  It laments the decline of bipartisanship.  It maintain that, without bipartisanship, “our democracy cannot work, and nation cannot cohere” (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 111).  If bipartisanship cannot be renewed, “America is no longer governable” (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 111).  The call for bipartisanship is laudable, and it is indeed a welcome relief. 
 
     However, the authors of the report do not see that, in the context of the present framing of national debate, a governing consensus is not possible, because none of the conflictive political bands of the moment has an understanding and a proposed national project that could possibly enlist the support of the majority.  The ultra-Right finds scapegoats responsible for the nation’s decline, energizing some, but offending the majority.  The Right formulates untruths about American history, tapping into the sentiments of those who want to recapture a greatness lost, but provoking resistance among a majority that senses that the Right’s reading of American history is a half-truth, inasmuch as the American promise of democracy always has been contradicted by the American reality.  And the Left turns to identity politics, resentfully lashing out at past and current social sins, alienating a majority at the outset.  Given the inherent theoretical and political limitations of each political band, a governing consensus cannot be attained by patching together pieces from each.  What is needed is not a compromise that integrates limited understandings, but a reframing of the analysis and a new understanding, making possible a reformulation of the issues in a politically intelligent form that would be capable of obtaining the consensual support of the majority.
 
      We need a national turn to the Left, but not to a Left that takes to the streets and shouts slogans, armed with self-righteous virtues and superficial understanding; rather, toward a Left that studies, organizes, and educates, developing a scientifically informed and politically intelligent national project proposal, rooted in basic moral values.  Perhaps as a reflection of the current weakness of the Left, the Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings study group does not express concern with a possible rise of a renewed Left.  Rather, the study group is concerned with the rise of a scapegoating and white nationalist ultra-Right, symbolized by the election of Trump.  Its political objective is to rescue the political establishment from the consequences of its lack of commitment to the nation and to the people, by forging a Right/center-Right consensus that would attend to the needs of the white working class, undercutting the rising ultra-Right. 
 
      Accordingly, the study group presents itself as a bipartisan group of scholars, half leaning to the Left and half leaning to the Right, that has sought a bipartisan consensus concerning proposals that Democrats and Republicans in the Congress could support (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 12).  The report maintains that, in spite of the current conflictive national division between Left and Right, bipartisan compromise is possible.

​Our bipartisan working group offers the recommendations that follow. This doesn’t mean each of us agrees with every claim or supports every policy proposal. But we put them forward as a package—we believe the components fit together as a package. We all agree that the nation must take vigorous action to restore upward mobility for working-class Americans. America is increasingly polarized along party lines. Washington is close to paralyzed. Many on the right and left no longer agree even about facts, and different factions prioritize different essential American values, picking and choosing from what was once regarded as a universal creed. Our working group is determined to resist this division and the logic behind it—that left and right can never see eye to eye. We still believe it’s possible for conservatives and progressives to cooperate. Over the past year, we listened and negotiated and ultimately compromised with one another to create a plan that we believe is the best way forward (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 18).
 
     The bipartisan discourse that the study group attained in its yearlong considerations reflects the limitations of such a bipartisan approach.  As I will explain further in a subsequent post, the report has a subtle white-male-centric reading on American history, demonstrating no understanding of how the United States came to be a global power.  And it has a Northern perspective on the dynamics of international trade, apparently oblivious to the decades long demand of the neocolonized peoples of the world for a more just international economic order.  It does not discern that the world-system has overextended its economic, geographical, ecological, and political limits; that the nation’s decline is rooted in its incapacity to respond creatively and constructively to these global dynamics; and that, therefore, the world and the nation must find an alternative road. 
 
     The members of the study group seek a bipartisan consensus concerning the need for concrete steps to improve the economic and social conditions of the working class, a consensus that includes the committed participation of both established political parties as well as corporate executives.  Their political agenda is to rescue the political establishment from the current threat of the ultra-Right.  They are not capable of envisioning a genuine renewal of the American promise of democracy; or the development of a just, democratic, and sustainable world system.   With their limited assumptions, goals, and methodology, they arrives to propose good measures for the improvement of the conditions of the working class.  But they do not understand that the renewal of the nation requires the transformation of the political structures of the nation as well as the political-economic structures of the world-system.  Beyond specific measures, we need an alternative understanding and political project, which can only emerge from an analysis of the dynamics of the nation and the world-system from the vantage point of the dominated, exploited, and excluded, with their political empowerment as the primary objective.  We turn to the theme of the political empowerment of the working class in the following post.

​Reference
 
Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings Working Class Study (OA/AEI/BI).  2018.  Work, Skills, Community: Restoring opportunity for the working class.  (Opportunity America, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Brookings Institution).

     A study group convened by Opportunity America and cosponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution have issued a report, Work, Skills, Community: Restoring opportunity for the working class (OA/AEI/BI, 2018).  The report begins by noting that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 made clear the political importance of the working class.  It maintains that the Trump campaign gave the working class a high priority, and working-class voters responded by abandoning their traditional Democratic roots and voting for Trump in key Rust Belt states important in the Electoral College. 
 
      The report defines the working class as consisting of persons “with at least a high school diploma but less than a four-year  college degree living in households between the 20th and 50th income percentiles—roughly $30,000 to $69,000 a year for a household with two adults and one child” (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 1).  It includes whites (58.6%), Hispanics (18.3%), and blacks (17.1%) (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 12). For the most part, the report discusses the working class as a multi-cultural category, without reference to race or ethnicity, a useful strategy for discussing socio-economic conditions.  However, inasmuch as the white working class voted for Trump in a much higher percentage than the Hispanic or black working class, the framing of the report establishes as a constant and primary concern with the impact of the dynamics affecting the working class as a whole on the political and social attitudes of white workers in particular.  Indeed, the report could be interpreted as implicitly asserting that, if the government and the corporations do not attend more to the needs of the working class, white workers will increasing turn to the ultra-Right, to white nationalism, and to new forms of fascism, which would weaken the capacity of the political establishment to govern.
 
      The report outlines a number of factors since 1980 that have effected the U.S. working class adversely: the loss of manufacturing jobs as a result of automation, factory relocation, and corporate investments abroad (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 51, 61-62); stagnating wages and declining wealth (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 27-28, 34, 61); falling union membership (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 10, 34, 63), limited parental leave benefits and insufficient affordable high-quality child care (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 36, 102-5); and insufficient training programs oriented to workplace skills (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 77-86).  The report maintains that these work-related insufficiencies have social and personal consequences: declining rates of marriage, an increasing number of single parent families, decline of participation in religious and civic associations, and increasing drug addiction and overdoses (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 52-54, 97-98).  These dynamics have affected all sectors of American society, but they have hit the working class the hardest (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 111).
 
     What occurred, the report maintains, was that the nation retreated from the social contract that had been built on unions and government benefits.  Previously, unions “checked the power of corporations” and were able to improve wages and working conditions.  There was a range of government benefits, including social security, the GI bill, labor laws, and support for home ownership.  As the nation turned from the social contract, “the political establishment looked the other way,” seeming to favor every group except those with moderate incomes (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 10-11).
 
     The report pays special attention to the effects of these dynamics on the quality of life of the white working class.  It notes that US middle-aged whites with only a high-school education or less is one of the few groups of the world for which mortality rates are not declining, as a result of an increase of deaths by drugs, alcohol, or suicide (OA/AEI/BI, 2018, 10).  And it describes their effects on the political and social attitudes of white workers.

Reference
 
Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings Working Class Study (OA/AEI/BI).  2018.  Work, Skills, Community: Restoring opportunity for the working class.  (Opportunity America, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Brookings Institution).