It’s easy to tell that the author of this letter to Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish is an historian just from the reference to Standing at Armageddon:
Having looked at the Simon Johnson piece and the excerpt from the Dish, I found a strange resonance with my current studies in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era from 1877 to 1919. What especially struck me was this particular quotation: “the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington”. Its eerily familiar to the term “identity of interest” used by Nell Irvin Painter to describe a common view amongst American capitalists and particularly the Republican Party at the end of the nineteenth century.
This was a supposed common interest shared by both the masses who worked and the capitalists who owned the mines, factories, and mills in the continued prosperity and development of American industry. The result was a government that did not intervene with Johnson-chart the workings of industry in the fear that by doing so it would imperil not only the capitalists but working America as well. It was, in short, about prosperity, not equity. Fast-forward a little over a century and we seem to have come full circle, but instead of industry, we have financial institutions ‘developing wealth’.
That same part of that Johnson article makes me think of the efforts of manufacturers to establish an “identity of interest” with their employees, both yesterday and today. Vote Republican. Don’t organize or support the Employee Free Choice Act because we know what’s best for you, not those outsiders/hoods who’ll take your dues money and leave you nothing in return.
Of course, that strategy works great during periods of prosperity, but now I hope they have another thing coming.
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