A point of the book from which this essay is excerpted is that postwar liberalism, including its version of a left, hinged on making capitalism’s fundamental class contradictions, if not capitalism itself, disappear into an ether of ideological mystifications. These included such formulations as industrial pluralism, interest-group politics, race relations, consumer society, affluent society, industrial then post-industrial society, an amorphous and incoherent middle class, homeowner populism, and the American Way. These and other such mystifications became the baseline common sense for thinking and talking about, and acting within, American politics among scholars, political actors and commentators, and the population at large. Despite the standard posture of High Church liberal propagandists inclined to declaim ex cathedra on such airy matters, that common sense did not emerge organically from an essentialized American national character. Rather, it was the product of class struggle, a combination of three-quarters of a century of matter-of-fact proclamation as incontestable truth in predominant venues of conventionalist bloviation29—the academy, corporate newsfotainment industry, popular culture—which project one or another narrative of American exceptionalism, and aggressive ideological warfare that included active suppression of alternative perspectives via red-baiting and other forms of scapegoating, censorship, and coercion for two decades after World War II30 and perhaps again in this moment of emboldened authoritarianism.
In that context, postwar capitalism’s fundamental class contradictions appeared only indirectly—for example, in the pragmatic form of contestation over the full employment/inflation trade-off.31 The absence of an openly anti-capitalist left has meant that there is no credible alternative to a Democratic party that, at least since the Clinton presidency (though Jimmy Carter was the warm-up act for Reagan’s assault on workers, and the Kennedy administration’s shift toward giving pride of place to currency stability over full employment was a germinal step toward neoliberalism), has been little better than a “me too, but not so much” version of neoliberalism.32 Indeed, Democrats’ tendencies to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds in their efforts to finesse what Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno identify succinctly as nominally democratic capitalism’s “contradiction between accumulation and legitimation”33 is perhaps nowhere displayed more clearly than in their approach to health care reform, which amounts to criticizing supposed excesses of profit-drivenness and privatization, while intransigently supporting, even encouraging, both in practice.34
Maher and Aquanno note as well that, as the contradiction between accumulation and legitimation sharpened toward a perceived crisis point for capital in the 1970s, a governing class consensus began to form around the need to break entirely with the logic of the New Deal state to facilitate securing class discipline “in order to restore accumulation and resolve the crisis of imperialism.”