Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 11: The Third World at Home Segment 2/6
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Studies of public opinion bring out other strands. A June 1992 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of the population do not expect life to improve for the next generation of Americans -- not too surprising, given that real wages have been dropping for 20 years, with an accelerated decline under Reaganite "conservatism," which also managed to extend the cloud over the college-educated. Public attitudes are illuminated further by the current popularity of ex-presidents: Carter is well in the lead (74 percent) followed by the virtually unknown Ford (68 percent), with Reagan at 58 percent, barely above Nixon (54 percent). Dislike of Reagan is particularly high among working people and "Reagan Democrats," who gave him "the highest unfavorable rating [63 percent] of a wide range of public officials," one study found. Reagan's popularity was always largely a media concoction; the "great communicator" was quickly dismissed when the farce would no longer play.5

The Harris polling organization has been measuring alienation from institutions for 25 years. Its latest survey, for 1991, found the numbers at an all-time high of 66 percent. Eighty-three percent of the population feel that "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer," saying that "the economic system is inherently unfair," Harris president Humphrey Taylor comments. The concerns of the overwhelming majority, however, cannot be addressed within the political system; even the words can barely be spoken or heard. The journalist who reports these facts sees only people who are angry at "their well-paid politicians" and want "more power to the people," not "more power to the government." We are not allowed to think that government might be of and by the people, or that they might seek to change an economic system that 83 percent regard as "inherently unfair."6

Another poll revealed that "faith in God is the most important part of Americans' lives." Forty percent "said they valued their relationship with God above all else"; 29 percent chose "good health" and 21 percent a "happy marriage." Satisfying work was chosen by 5 percent, respect of people in the community by 2 percent. That this world might offer basic features of a human existence is hardly to be contemplated. These are the kinds of results one might find in a shattered peasant society. Chiliastic visions are reported to be particularly prevalent among blacks; again, not surprising, when we learn from the New England Journal of Medicine that "black men in Harlem were less likely to reach the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh."7

Also driven from the mind is any sense of solidarity and community. Educational reform is designed for those whose parents can pay, or at least are motivated to "get ahead." The idea that there might be some general concern for children -- not to speak of others -- must be suppressed. We must make "the true costs of bearing a child out of wedlock clear" by letting "them be felt when they are incurred -- namely at the child's birth"; the teenage high-school dropout must realize that her child will get no help from us (Michael Kaus). In the rising "culture of cruelty," Ruth Conniff writes, "the middle-class taxpayer, the politician, and the wealthy upper class are all victims" of the undeserving poor, who must be disciplined and punished for their depravity, down to future generations.

When the Caterpillar corporation recruited scabs to break a strike by the United Auto Workers, the union was "stunned" to find that unemployed workers crossed the picket line with no remorse, while Caterpillar workers found little "moral support" in their community. The union, which had "lifted the standard of living for entire communities in which its members lived," had "failed to realize how public sympathy had deserted organized labor," a study by three Chicago Tribune reporters concludes -- another victory in an unremitting business campaign of many decades that the union leadership refused to see. It was only in 1978 that UAW President Doug Fraser criticized the "leaders of the business community" for having "chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country -- a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society," and having "broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress." That was far too late, and the tactics of the abject servant of the rich who soon took office destroyed a good bit of what was left.8

The Tribune study sees the defeat of the union as "the end of an era, the end of what may be the proudest creation of the American labor movement in the 20th century: a large blue-collar middle class." That era, based on a corporation-union compact in a state-subsidized private economy, had come to an end 20 years earlier, and the "one-sided class war" had been underway long before. Another component of the compact was "the exchange of political power for money" by the union leaders (David Milton), a bargain that lasted as long as the rulers found it to their advantage. Trust in the good faith and benevolence of the masters will yield no other outcome.

A crucial component of the state-corporate campaign is the ideological offensive to overcome "the crisis of democracy" caused by the efforts of the rabble to enter the political arena, reserved for their betters. Undermining of solidarity with working people is one facet of that offensive. In his study of media coverage of labor, Walter Puette provides ample evidence that in the movies, TV, and the press the portrayal of unions has generally "been both unrepresentative and virulently negative." Unions are depicted as corrupt, outside the mainstream, "special interests" that are either irrelevant or actually harmful to the interests of workers and the general public, "un-American in their values, strategies, and membership." The theme "runs deep and long through the history of media treatment," and "has helped push the values and goals of the American labor movement off the liberal agenda." This is, of course, the historic project, intensified when need arises.9


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5 Steven Greenhouse, NYT, "Income Data Show Years of Erosion for U.S. Workers," NYT, Sept. 7; Adam Pertman, BG, July 15; Garry Wills, New York Review, Sept. 24, 1992., 1992.

6 John Dillin, CSM, July 14, 1992.

7 AP, BG, April 4, 1991. NE J. of Med., Jan. 1990, cited by Melvin Konner, NYT, Feb. 24, 1990.

8 See ch. 4.3. Conniff, Progressive, Sept. 1992, reviewing Kaus, End of Equality. Stephen Franklin, Peter Kendall and Colin McMahon, "Caterpillar strikers face the bitter truth," pt. 3 of series, Chicago Tribune, Sept. 6, 7, 9, 1992. Fraser cited in Moody, Injury, 147.

9 Milton, Politics, 155; Puette, Through Jaundiced Eyes.