Bush is Out to Unravel the New Deal (Markowitz/Pol Affairs)

[struggle4progress]

The New Deal did not establish a new social contract in a formal way, but legislation that both dealt in the short-run with a far-reaching economic and social crisis and established new institutional protections and guarantees, in effect social subsidies, for the general population. The term "safety net" is a later postwar invention. The Social Security Act, along with the Wagner Act, was passed in 1935 in the midst of a vast increase in labor organizing and militancy that had begun the year before and would last until 1938, leading to the formation of the CIO, the great sit down strikes, the organization of millions of new workers into both old and new unions and the spread of class conscious ideologies and policies through the society.

The New Deal surfed and often sought to moderate that wave. It did not, unlike previous governments, use force to drive it back. Its policies were always oriented toward saving and reforming capitalism and Social Security was part of that. But its definition of the system it was seeking to save was different than not only the present administration, but much of postwar American politics, where programs like Social Security were contained, trade unions were initially contained then sharply reduced in both influence and in the percentage of workers who belong to them, "alternative benefit programs" were established in the supplementary pensions, private insurance based medical insurance, subsidized educational loans, to substitute for what Western Europe and other parts of the world came to call a "welfare state."

The present political context in the US is radically different from both the New Deal and postwar cold war influenced context with one important exception. Those who literally from the 1930s on sought to eradicate the New Deal in its entirety, to deregulate everything, demonize and eliminate social welfare institutional reforms, are moving ahead with their policies. This trend was revived in the 1980 but was only partially successful: freezing rather than abolishing minimum wages, raising social security payroll taxes and resisting benefit expansion rather than privatization. Today they are moving ahead, given what they see as their control of all branches of the federal government. <snip>

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/682/1/77/