Which raises the obvious question of why. I'm reminded of this quote from Ronald Wright (about whom I know nothing else): "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Which is to say the marketing of the American Dream has been so successful that any failure to achieve it seems to be seen as the fault of the person themselves rather than any external factors. I mean, I'm sure I've seen somewhere that even lowly paid people don't like the idea of raising income taxes on the wealthiest Americans because they can so vividly see themselves belonging to that class at some point in the future.
That pretty much hits the nail on the head. There's an even shorter answer that says what you've formulated here, but in a very quotable form: Americans are terrified of the S-word -- socialism.
Which is to say, Americans are fine with certain social institutions, because they've been well disguised. But to give political power to "the workers" smacks of those crazy European countries with sky-high taxes and volatile coalition governments, hovering just one step this side of communism. I think it's just good old American exceptionalism, the belief that our brand of political democracy and economic capitalism is better (somehow) than everyone else's by its very nature. We don't want to do anything that dilutes our sense of individuality and superiority, even if it's clearly in our best interest.
To be sure, there is the strong feeling that every American is a frustrated millionaire. Even people of modest income will defend the notion that it's not the government's business to "punish success" by high taxes, because they really do fear that even their modest success will draw attention. And especially in the middle sections of the country, being satisfied with an honest day's pay for an honest day's work is still something of pride. Not every American wants to be a billionaire. But every American wants to lay claim to what he believes he has earned.
I'm sure you've heard the Makers and Takers analogy. This is the notion that American residents can be broken into two broad groups. The Makers are those who contribute value to the economy, largely by prudent financial management that provides the capital lifeblood from which American business is built. The Takers are lazy layabouts who exploit social and economic systems in order to make their living by a transfer of wealth from the Makers. Taxation is the conduit by which this occurs. And because this is America, the Takers are invariably depicted as racial minorities and/or illegal immigrants.
That's the story the Right would have you believe. A more accurate view is that the workers are the Makers who create value in the economy. Because of wage disparity and the lack of a poltically-endowed labor movement, the Takers are the business owners and stock holders who form the One Percent, and make their income largely via the economic rents this system engenders while creating comparatively negligible actual value. The Makers themselves lack the capital to buy into this system. So the wealth transfers upward instead of "trickling down."
And now since the wealthy elite have formed a political oligarchy in the United States, the barrier to an organized labor movement having real political power is all but impassable.
And yet in the pre-unionised days, a doco I saw recently about Walt Disney suggested his workplace in the late 1930s was a nightmare...
It probably was. We point to 1948 as the nominal end of the original Studio System, and animators didn't unionize until the early 1950s. The original union agreements in the 1920s were mostly for manual labor -- carpenters, stage hands, etc. although the Screen Actors Guild did go back that far.
And who else was doing animation at that scale back then? Nobody besides Disney was taking animation seriously as an art form. So if they're the only game in town, I'm not sure unionizing improves your plight that much more.
But to go back to my last point, Hollywood itself plays an insidious role in marketing the American Dream, thanks to movies about people who succeed at the American Dream from the most trying circumstances, especially if they can market it as involving real people who really did succeed from the most trying circumstances.
I think it's a vicious circle. The major complaint against Hollywood beginning in the era that produced the films you mentioned was that it was entirely profit-minded. You could make a case that those movies were made with those messages because that's what market research showed people would pay money to see. If a feel-good underdog movie is what's going to make $200 million profit that quarter, then that's the movie that gets made. It may accidentally reinforce that completely unrealistic economic outlook, but I'm not sure there's an ideological motive that outshines simply making whatever dreck they determine will score that year.
...and then there's the fact that the job naturally suits extroverts, which not all of us are.
I'll never grasp the myth of infinitely fungible labor as an excuse for dealing with the consequences of economic shifts. If the U.S. suddenly decides to outsource all its engineering to China, it's not like I'm going to find success now as a pastry chef. The One Percent likes to tell people that foreign competition and illegal immigrants are taking their jobs. And we need to eliminate regulation on business to allow it to be more competitive, and to abolish labor unions that artificially rase the price of labor. And we need to build large fences in the desert to keep out illegal immigrants.
Of course what really happened is that American industry intentionally outsourced labor to cheaper sources of it. And the result of lowering taxes and removing expensive regulation not historically been a reinvestment in American labor, but rather the payment of dividends and the acquisition of more profits, which are then moved offshore to make them ineligible for U.S. taxation. And U.S. industry has invested heavily in automation, with the stated goal of reducing its labor costs. There is no way "reducing labor costs" doesn't translate to firing people, paying them less, or both. And the reduction of labor costs is not aimed at making things more efficient and thus lowering prices. The prices stay the same, and the margins increase. And where do the margins go? Upward.
Factory and farm workers just can't up and train for new careers as web designers and account managers. I might be in for a new career as a tree surgeon, since I'm cleaning up the debris from the 100-plus mile per hour winds we had blowing down my street last night. Yes, a Category 2 hurricane in Utah. But that's just my side hustle.
It's a shame that unions seem to have a bad reputation in the USA.
It goes back to United States Steel and their successful campaigns against the fledgling steelworkers' unions. Since then, organized labor has been socially and politically stereotyped with socialism/communism, and economically identified as leeches on American competition. Early unions in the U.S. didn't really obtain much power initially. And since the breaking point came in 1918-1919 -- formative years for national Communist movements -- it was trivial for U.S. Steel to portray the striking workers as Communists seeking to overthrow the American way of life. And good people looked the other way while brutal things happened. The American capitalist/industrialist really hasn't changed his stripes since the bad old days.
It's hard to see this as anything but companies doing what they think they can get away with, unless they're shown up by either internal whistleblowers or unions.
I don't think there's any point in trying to see it any other way than rampant corporatism pushing the boundaries. In the United States, getting away with as much as you can seems to be a point of pride. Skill at the corporate executive level seems to be measured by how much regulation or law you can sidestep with impunity, especially if other people at the company's highest levels benefit. During the hearing of Goldman Sachs executives before Congress in 2008 or so, these people were legitimately proud that they had circumvented regulation in order to structure deals that were highly risky and putatively profitable. The fact that the crashed the world's economy didn't even put a tarnish on their pride.
Labor unions in the U.S. are not seen as watchdogs against management misconduct. If a union points out misconduct, it's interpreted as a negotiating ploy. The truthfulness of the allegations probably would not even register. Pointing out "poor working conditions," for example, is often seen as simply wanting a more cushy job. Non-unionized workers in American are often apt to characterize union labor as lazy and overpaid. Of course this is an image carefully foisted upon them by politicians and big business. But it's probably more apt to be believed in the U.S. than in other countries, where labor and capital have a more equitable footing.
This is why I think the American Experiment is not so much whether a representative government of, by, and for the people can long endure. It's whether such a disparate rabble of people can unify under one banner. George Washington said, in one of the brilliant addresses Alexander Hamilton wrote for him, that the two-edged sword of American government was that it allowed maximum freedom, so long as individual discipline would be maintained. People will simply not tolerate abuses of power or encroachment upon their rights. And if they did not behave with honor and discipline themselves, the people -- in one form or another -- would take steps to enforce good behavior more broadly. If not by government authority, then by taking to the streets. If I, through my entitled and wanton misbehavior, trespass upon Gillianren in any way she finds uncomfortable, the courts may redress. Or they may not, because I might not have committed any cognizable tort. But that doesn't mean she has to endure my boorish conduct. Thus breeds contempt among neighbors.
But isn't it the case that this balancing act is common to many enterprises? Doesn't every democratic form of government contain within it the potential for its own destruction?
After all, even a supposedly anti-democratic party can win a democratic election if enough people support it, and then enact the anti-democratic policy agenda it says it was elected to undertake. The scary thing is that such things have happened...
Isn't that essentially how we got the Third Reich in Germany?
