A vanished world and the question of democracy
By 
I’m front paging this very interesting comment (the author can reveal themselves to me strictly confidentially at [email protected] if they are so inclined):
You know me under a different name.
Since we’re telling stories. My dad was an engineer. He worked for one of the largest companies in the US at the time. My mom was a teacher. After she had me she quit teaching for a long while but she did go back to it. When she was pregnant with my sister, my parents moved to a new home in the suburbs. A 3 br 1 ba home with a 1 car garage. Across the street lived a family we would become close to. The dad had a job out at the airport. He was a ground crew member.
We didn’t have a car for a while. My dad took the train to work. The company also had a motor pool and employees could borrow the cars on weekends. When we finally got a car it was a used Ford. Our friends across the street had a similar car.
Fast forward 12 years. My dad is now President of that same company. (One away from CEO) We have moved many times. We come back to the area and my parents buy a very nice home in what the WSJ says is the most expensive place to buy a new home in America. Its a 3000 square foot 4/2.5 with a 2 car garage. My dad buys a new car. Its a Chevy Caprice. Our old friends come to visit. They drive up in a Chevy Impala. Our mom’s have a Chevy Nova and Chevy Vega respectively.
I learn that my friend is going to the state flagship university in the fall. He learns that I am going a couple states over to a private university. We can argue about who would get the better education.
Theres not that much difference between our two families even though our paths diverged. About 1000 square feet on the house and a couple model differences on the cars. Remember when Flint, Michigan used to have the highest average income of any city in the US? The Midwest was a prosperous place!
When my parents died I was going through boxes of paper. I almost fainted when I saw my dad’s pay stub. Yes, there were a lot of deductions for deferred comp etc. But the take home pay was less than I was making at the time and I was nowhere near President of a Fortune 50 company.
If you look at comp for that same job at that same company today, (it’s a public record) your teeth would fall out. The guy that eventually fired my dad would become a “Bush Pioneer” for his political donations, and the company sold all the old industrial equipment and shipped it all to China. They would concentrate on government contracts now. The CEO had a wing at the hospital named after him. He owned a home in the Cayman Islands.
All this happened after 1980.
CEO pay has increased over 600x.
It wasn’t always like this. In the United States I trace the great divergence directly back to Ronald Reagan.
Here I just want to mention something about Reagan’s election, which is that I sometimes like to speculate about what would have happened if he had in fact defeated Ford for the GOP nomination in 1976, as he came so close to doing. Would he have defeated Carter — a very idiosyncratic candidate in his own right — in the general? I suspect he would have, as Ford, who had the charisma of an instruction manual for assembling a lawnmower, and who had hurt himself badly by pardoning Nixon, barely lost anyway. The counter-argument is that in 1976 the idea of Ronald Reagan as president was still considered by much of the elite media and the stodgier elements of the GOP establishment to be a bad joke, and he might therefore have faced more headwinds than he did in 1980 (I can think of another “maverick” GOP candidate who was also considered a bad joke by these same entities a few decades later however). Keep in mind that Carter was the only Democratic presidential candidate to win between LBJ’s rout of Goldwater in 1964 and Bill Clinton’s plurality win of a fractured electorate 28 years later. (BTW if Ford had won it’s basically a 100% certainty that Reagan would have been the nominee in 1980, as Ford wouldn’t have been eligible for re-election).
But that’s a side point to this comment, which I think gets at something very real and very important about the massive shift that’s taken place in America over the past 45 years, which I alluded to in the post to which this comment was reacting. I posted a comment of my own in that thread, responding to Shirley pointing out how absurd it was for the NYT’s reporters to frame the Epstein story as one that “raises questions” about Donald Trump’s “judgment and character.”
But behind the tabloid glamour, questions have lingered about what Mr. Trump’s long association with Mr. Epstein says about his judgment and character.
It says what everything else we know about him says. He’s a pervy criminal scumball.
- Paul Campos I mean the crazy making thing is that something like an actual majority of the people who voted for him would agree with this! You have to be off in QAnon la la land to deny something that’s about as controversial among non-insane people as the color of the sky. What can you do when a democracy (of a sort) does this kind of thing?
That is the question I most want to see both raised and, more important ,answered.