The 2024 election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump makes clear that the U.S. has two right-wing parties and no effective left-wing opposition.
Trump and the GOP support regressive tax policies and fervent anti-immigrant measures while the Democrats offer a Republican-light domestic economic program combined with hawkish foreign policies that earned Kamala Harris the endorsement of neo-conservative hardliner Dick Cheney.
With both parties competing to screw over working class people, culture war issues have become determinant in elections over the past generation, with the Democrats embracing identity politics in an attempt to mask their commitment to advancing corporate interests almost as egregiously as the GOP.
David Gibbs’s new book Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America’s Class Divide argues that the roots of today’s dystopian political landscape lie in the successful strategies of wealthy businessmen in the 1970s.[1]
Prior to that time, a social compact prevailed under the New Deal order, lasting roughly from 1932 to 1968, by which the power of corporations was curtailed to some extent by unions and economic policies were adopted by governing elites that contributed to middle-class growth.
Designed largely to avert the prospect of social revolution in the Great Depression, these policies included regulation of the banking structure under Glass-Steagall, progressive income tax rates, a relatively robust social safety net, laws granting unions organizing and collective bargaining rights, and government commitment to funding public education.
After some of the first New Deal measures were passed, J.P. Morgan, the DuPont family and wealthy Texas oil barons funded the Liberty League, which flooded the country with incendiary propaganda accusing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of bringing socialism to the U.S., and tried to unseat him in a coup.
The coup failed and, when Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, became president in the 1950s, he preserved core New Deal programs.
Things changed in the 1970s when wealthy businessmen, who had accommodated themselves to the New Deal, became alarmed by declining corporate profits,[2] inflation and the political activism of the 1960s generation.
They began marshaling funds into right-wing think tanks and lobbying groups and, with the support of President Richard M. Nixon, worked to develop a conservative counter-establishment that helped shift the country’s political-economic landscape dramatically rightward.
Right-wing economists associated with the Mont Pelerin Society, including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, were at the heart of the conservative counter-establishment, along with Christian evangelical preachers like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham, who mobilized their legions of followers in support of the right-wing power shift.
Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom, arguing for deregulation, privatization, and fiscal austerity, was particularly influential in helping to facilitate the displacement of Keynesian thinking and its emphasis on a robust public sector, which predominated during the New Deal era.
Contrary to the depiction of some historians, Richard Nixon was a highly ideological president. He sought to advance a conservative agenda consistent with the worldview of Mont Pelerin Society economists like Friedman who in the 1950s and 1960s was considered “radical right” and part of a “lunatic fringe” to quote Gibbs.[3]
An influential member of the Mont Pelerin Society, George Shultz, a professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Chicago with Friedman who became Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, served in the Nixon administration as Treasury Secretary, Labor Secretary and director of the Office of Management and Budget.[4] Shultz was one of many Mont Pelerin Society alumni appointed to influential positions in the Nixon administration.[5]
An important element of Nixon’s agenda, according to Gibbs, was to galvanize corporate interests to fund right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, as counterweights to centrist think tanks like the Ford Foundation, Brookings Institution and Council on Foreign Relations.
Further, Nixon championed millionaire-funded conservative lobby groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which sent brochures to legislators around the country advocating for conservative social and economic policies.
Corporate America’s strategy in this period was showcased in a leaked memo from future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, a Virginia corporate lawyer with close ties to the tobacco industry, calling for a massive influence campaign aimed at Congress, state legislatures and courts and which was to be promoted on television and in the mass media and educational systems. The main goal was to combat liberals, New Left and supporters of consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader who wanted to transform the political-economic system along more socialist lines.[6]
Powell’s memo inspired a flurry of activity by business lobby groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers, to transform the political culture of the country in a right-wing direction, including by altering school curricula and financing university faculty.
The ideas of Milton Friedman were disseminated through the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the Free to Choose series, which showcased Friedman’s economics in simplified form for the lay viewer in ten episodes which first aired in 1980.[7]
In addition to influencing the mainstream, there was an effort to build up a distinctly conservative media and to establish media watchdog groups, like Accuracy in Media, that monitored and fought against alleged anti-business press coverage.[8] The watchdog groups pushed mainstream media outlets like The New York Times to adopt a more conservative cast than previously.[9]
A key part of the strategy of “the rich in revolt” was to try to divide the working and middle classes along lines of religion, race and culture. Over time, they pushed identity politics in a way that would prevent an inter-racial movement from developing capable of challenging corporate power.
The Libertarian movement took off in the 1970s with funding from the Koch Brothers, oil billionaires, and other rich donors who aimed to advance a radical free market dogma.
In foreign policy, right-wing businessmen associated with military industries formed lobby groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger, which played up the phony Soviet “threat” and advocated for a major increase in defense spending and an end to Nixon-Kissinger’s détente policies.
They also supported the deregulation of global financial markets and exchange rates and maneuvered to ensure U.S. global dollar supremacy, including by supporting a blood pact with Saudi Arabia by which the Saudis agreed to sell their oil in U.S. dollars in exchange for U.S. weapons and security guarantees.[10]
Neo-conservative intellectuals like Irving Kristol were clever in playing off a growing public consciousness over human rights in the 1970s to advocate for more military interventions to stop human rights abuses, maligning leftist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky who spotlighted the human rights atrocities of U.S. client regimes and political-economic imperatives underlying them.
While many of the neo-con writers were ideologically driven, others were opportunists who were able to parlay their advocacy for higher military budgets and war into lucrative consulting jobs with military contractors or large corporations that profited from U.S. overseas interventions.[11]
The Committee on the Present Danger’s co-founder, David Packard, was also a co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, which did major computing work for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, and its first co-chairman, Henry H. Fowler, was a partner at the Wall Street investment firm of Goldman Sachs.[12]
Gibbs points out that the New Right’s method of drawing together disparate groups for unified action had no counterpart on the left, which fragmented after the 1960s into single issue groups focused largely on identity politics (race and gender[13]) or environmentalism rather than trying to mobilize the working class.
Collapsing after the end of the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement was anemic in response to the massive military buildup of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the disinformation that accompanied it.
The labor movement had been severely weakened by McCarthy-era purges along with deindustrialization and the shift to a service economy, and many union leaders embraced a militaristic foreign policy.
A sizeable number of leftists at this time were inclined to write off the white proletariat as unreachable and perhaps not worth reaching—a viewpoint advanced by left-wing intellectual gurus like Herbert Marcuse who paved the way for modern-day identity politics.[14]
When Hubert Humphrey and Augustus Hawkins proposed a full employment bill in Congress in 1975, the AFL-CIO opposed it, and women and environmentalist groups offered only minimal support at best, doing nothing to mobilize people to help get it passed.[15]
President Jimmy Carter ended up signing a watered-down version of the bill, which merely encouraged the government to pursue full employment, and the legislation was soon forgotten.[16]
Gibbs presents Carter as a fundamentally conservative leader who set the groundwork for the right-wing “Reagan Revolution” as much as Richard Nixon.
Carter’s close ties to corporate America were apparent in his membership in the Rockefeller-financed Trilateral Commission, which was dedicated to restoring U.S. global supremacy after the Vietnam War.
When he was governor of Georgia, Carter most influential adviser was Charles Kirbo, a senior partner in the Atlanta law firm of King & Spaulding, which represented Coca Cola.[17]
A key event in Carter’s presidency was the 1979 appointment of a Rockefeller protégé, Paul Volcker, to head the Federal Reserve, a decision Gibbs says was instrumental in fulfilling the conservative goal of redistributing wealth and income toward the privileged classes.
Volcker set extraordinarily high interest rates—characterized by German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt as the “highest since the birth of Jesus Christ”—and pushed for the imposition of austerity measures as part of the attempt to curb inflation, which had been artificially induced. [18]
As a result of the “Volcker Shock,” unemployment expanded to 10.8% and living standards were lowered, with Carter basically guaranteeing his own defeat in the 1980 election.
The grain belt of the Midwest was especially hard hit by the Fed’s policies, which produced waves of farm foreclosures and spikes in rates of mental illness and suicides resulting from harsh economic conditions.[19]
The harsh conditions and upward transfer of wealth were made worse by Carter’s deregulation of the airline, banking and trucking industries, the latter of which was transformed into a “sweatshop on wheels.”[20]
Carter’s support for economic austerity measures did not apply to the military as Carter expanded the military budget in his last two years, investing in high-tech weaponry associated with the “Revolution in Military Affairs.”[21]
Further, Carter began arming Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan in an effort to draw the Soviets into “the Afghan trap,” and ramped up the U.S. military presence in the Middle East.
Since the 1980s, the neo-conservative movement has completely taken over the U.S. foreign policy establishment with catastrophic results for all of humanity.
Within the U.S., the revolt of the rich described by Gibbs has helped to revitalize Gilded Age-level social inequalities and destroyed the American Dream for younger generations that are saddled with massive student debt.
Interestingly, Gibbs shows in his book how the rich will precipitate societal crisis—both at home and abroad—including by creating artificial recessions, so that they can introduce draconian policies the public would never otherwise support. We have seen this strategy play out most recently in very dramatic form.
Another disturbing focus of Gibbs’s study is on the acquiescence of wide strata of the population to an economic policy program that has harmed almost everyone. Key is the failure of the political left, which continues to make the same mistakes over and over again and to dither as Rome burns.
Gibbs is a professor of history at the University of Arizona who has written previous books on U.S. foreign policy on Congo and the Balkans. ↑
Gibbs attributes the declining corporate profits in this period to an artificial rise in oil prices and reduced government spending on transportation infrastructure. David Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America’s Class Divide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), 72. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 48, 50. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 51. ↑
Others included John Connally, William Simon, Robert Bork, Herbert Stein and Paul McCracken. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 66. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 69. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 70. ↑
Idem. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, ch. 5. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 122. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 128. The original Committee on the Present Danger was founded in 1950 by Paul Nitze and other hawkish cold warrior. It was designed as a “citizen’s lobby” to alert the nation to the Soviet “present danger,” and the resultant need to adopt a huge military buildup. The Committee was reestablished in 1976 with the same underlying goals in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, which had fueled isolationist sentiment. The revitalization of the CPD grew out of an independent group called Team B authorized in 1976 by President Gerald Ford and organized by then-CIA chief, George Bush with the aim of promoting alarmist views about the Soviet “threat.” Neoconservatives later associated with the Project for the New American Century such as Paul Wolfowitz were part of Team B. 33 members received appointments in the Reagan adminstation, including CIA Director Bill Casey. ↑
Some elements in the feminist movement embraced working-class issues initially, especially in the push for government-funded childcare; however, the working-class focus of the feminist movement quickly dissipated. ↑
Marcuse’s function in distancing the New Left from the white working class is viewed in some circles as a coup for the plutocracy and has led to suspicion that Marcuse, who had worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, was a CIA “asset.” See Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” The Philosophical Salon, June 27, 2022. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 70. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 106. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 169. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 187, 188. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 189. Instead of gravitating to the left which failed to seize the moment, many displaced farmers organized new political groups and militias that advocated white supremacy, anti-Semitism and anti-government violence. ↑
Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich, 180. Additionally, Carter set the groundwork for the “Reagan Revolution” by easing the capital gains tax. ↑
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Improbable Militarist: Jimmy Carter, the Revolution in Military Affairs and Limits of the American Two-Party System,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, 6, 2 (2018). ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
An influential member of the Mont Pelerin Society, George Shultz, a professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Chicago with Friedman who became Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, served in the Nixon administration as Treasury Secretary, Labor Secretary and director of the Office of Management and Budget.[4] Shultz was one of many Mont Pelerin Society alumni appointed to influential positions in the Nixon administration.[5]
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George Schultz was one of the prominent powerful who sat on the Board of Directors of Theranos before the medical testing charade corporation went down in flames, after insiders blew the whistle and scandal ensued. Some observers postulate that Theranos was the original COVID “Plan A” for artificially blowing up COVID cases, which was shortly replaced by “Plan B” – bogus PCR testing, which successfully accomplished the same goal: Blowing up COVID cases, the necessary prerequisite step toward global mRNA injections, eugenics-based depopulation, and eventual Fascist totalitarian-control through central bank digital currency.