The unfinished revolution requires a reckoning and Reaganomics reversal

By James J. Devine

There was a moment, brief and improbable, when the conscience of this nation actually stirred in response to the challenge of asking what can you do for your country.

Not ‘conscience’ in the way politicians invoke it as an abstraction, a rhetorical garnish, but in the way that changes laws and ends careers and makes the people in power genuinely afraid.

In the span of a single generation, Americans looked at what their country actually was, rather than what it claimed to be, and refused to look away for a moment. Then someone waved a shiny object and trashed the greatest civilization in history.

We looked at segregation — not as a regional quirk or a matter of differing customs, but as a systematic, generations-long theft of human life, American labor, and Black dignity — and we demanded that the law finally mean what the founding documents had always said it meant.

We looked at the rivers catching fire and the children with lead in their blood and the sky above our industrial cities appearing to be the color of a bruise, and we understood that the license to poison our environment had never been anyone’s to grant.

Women looked at the lives that had been scripted for them — the legal subservience, the careers foreclosed, the bodies governed by legislatures full of men — and they tore the script up.

A generation looked at the body bags coming back from Vietnam and said, with a clarity that cut through every flag and every speech: not our children, not for this.

In the aftermath of Watergate, COINTELPRO, and the Church Committee revelations, we looked at the machinery of secret power — the wiretaps, the assassination plots, the president who believed the law bent around him — and we said, with the particular fury of a people discovering they have been lied to: never again.

We were building something in those years. Call it a moral architecture. It was unfinished, it was contested, it was imperfect in ways we are still reckoning with.

The direction was unmistakable. Toward accountability. Toward the recognition that power required justification and that the dignity of ordinary people was not a variable to be adjusted for the convenience of the powerful.

And then, at the precise moment the foundation was being laid for a more perfect union, they brought in the wrecking crews.

What followed was not, as its architects preferred to describe it, a course correction or an economic modernization.

It was a moral counterrevolution, and it was waged with the deliberateness of people who understood exactly what they were dismantling and why.

At the moment we had finally established that unchecked corporate power could not be trusted with the air and water, they handed the polluters the keys to the agencies built to restrain them.

At almost the precise moment organized labor had secured for working people something approaching a fair negotiation — wages that rose with productivity, benefits that acknowledged that workers were human beings with bodies that aged and children that needed feeding — they launched a fifty-year campaign to sever the American worker from the only institutional power that had ever reliably represented his interests.

At the exact moment we had learned, at the cost of 58,000 American lives and those of several million Vietnamese, that imperial adventures required democratic accountability, they built a new architecture of endless, opaque military entanglement funded by borrowed money while the social infrastructure of the country was told to make do with less.

The cruelty was not incidental. It was the point.

Consider what was deliberately discarded.

The civil rights movement had established, through blood and litigation and the moral force of people who refused to be moved, that economic justice and racial justice are not separate projects — that a system designed to exclude is a system designed to exclude, whatever vocabulary it uses to justify itself.

The neoliberal response was to export jobs from Black and white working-class communities with equal indifference, leaving behind shuttered factories and a manufactured poverty that was then blamed on the people it was manufactured for.

The women’s movement had fought for the right to work with security, with dignity, with compensation that did not treat female labor as a discount option, but it came into conflict with the extreme puritanical mythology embraced by right-wing religious zealots.

The new economy answered by making insecurity universal — converting careers into contingencies, stripping benefits from full-time work, and forcing millions of women into the impossible arithmetic of stagnant wages against accelerating costs.

The environmental movement had made the foundational argument that we are not separate from the natural world and that the health of the planet is not a policy preference but a condition of human survival. The response was to install lobbyists for the polluters as the regulators, and we are now living in the downstream consequences — in the poisoned water, in the fires that no longer surprise anyone, in the catastrophic storms we have stopped calling unprecedented because they have become the weather.

And the bitterest of all the betrayals: the generation that had sat in the Senate gallery and watched a president resign in disgrace, that had heard testimony about illegal wiretaps and assassination plots and an intelligence community that had decided the Constitution was a suggestion — that generation then watched, with diminishing outrage, as a new and perfectly legal corruption replaced the old illegal kind.

Campaign finance became a system for the open purchase of policy. Lobbyists wrote the legislation their clients needed. The distance between Wall Street and the Treasury Department became a commute.

The two parties, once at least nominally distinguishable by their relationship to working people and the common good, converged on a consensus that served the top of the wealth distribution and described this convergence as the responsible center.

We cannot now claim we did not know. That defense expired a long time ago.

We marched for civil rights, and we know that an economy engineered to deny opportunity along the axis of class produces outcomes indistinguishable from one engineered to deny it along the axis of race.

We demanded environmental protection, and we know that the fossil fuel companies and the chemical manufacturers are not confused about what they are doing to the atmosphere and the aquifers — they are simply calculating that the profits arrive before the consequences do, and that the consequences will be distributed among people with less power to resist them.

We fought for women’s liberation, and we know that economic precarity is not a neutral misfortune — that it functions as a mechanism of control, trapping people in cycles of dependence that foreclose exactly the choices that liberation was supposed to open.

We rose against an immoral war and learned that the military-industrial complex does not require a just cause to sustain itself, only a budget and a compliant legislature.

We exposed the corruption of secret power and learned that power, when it cannot operate secretly, will simply purchase the legitimacy it needs to engage in outright dishonesty, bribery, exploitation, extortion, fraud, and nepotism in plain sight.

All of that knowledge sits in us now. It was not cheaply acquired.

What is coming next will not be cheaper. The automation wave gathering force in the server farms and research laboratories of a technology industry accountable to no democratic institution is not a weather event.

It is a policy choice, currently being made by default, to allow the ownership of artificial intelligence — built substantially on publicly funded research and trained on the cultural and intellectual output of millions of people who will receive nothing in return — to concentrate in the same hands that already hold more wealth than the bottom ninety percent of this country combined.

When that technology eliminates the paralegal’s job, the truck driver’s livelihood, and the radiologist’s income, the proceeds will not be distributed. They will be captured. By people who are already, by any historical measure, incomprehensibly wealthy, and who are under no legal or political obligation to share a cent of it.

This is the road we are on. It leads to a place where human labor has no price the market will pay, where the right to live must be purchased from a class of owners whose claim to the machines rests on the prior accumulation of capital rather than on any contribution recognizable as work, and where the demand for goods and services collapses because the people who might consume them have been rendered economically superfluous by the very system that needs their consumption to survive.

It is not a complicated destination to describe.

Henry Ford understood this logic a century ago when he doubled his workers’ wages and explained that a man who could not afford to buy a car could not be a customer. We have simply decided to forget what Ford remembered.

There is another road. It is the one we started building in Selma and in the Senate hearings and in the streets outside the Democratic convention and on the first Earth Day when twenty million Americans decided that the planet was worth protecting.

It is paved with the proposition — simple, radical, and factually supported by every period of broadly shared American prosperity — that an economy is a tool. That its rules are written by human beings and can be rewritten by human beings.

The ownership of machines built on collective human knowledge does not confer an unlimited private claim on what those machines produce. That the fruits of a society’s productive capacity belong, in some meaningful proportion, to the society that made them possible.

We know this. We have always known this. The knowing is not the problem.

The problem is that we have spent forty years being told that the machine cannot be redesigned, that the market cannot be governed, that the alternative to oligarchy is Venezuela. We have been told this by people who benefit enormously from our believing it, in media they own, through politicians whose campaigns they finance, in the language of economic necessity that has always been the first refuge of those who find the current arrangement profitable.

The moral awakenings of the twentieth century were not given to us. They were taken, at cost, by people who refused to accept that what existed was what had to exist. The civil rights workers who sat at the Woolworth’s counter did not believe that the arc of history bent toward justice automatically. They bent it. The women who marched did not believe that liberation would arrive on a schedule set by the people who opposed it. They set the schedule themselves. The activists who forced the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act did not wait for the chemical companies to develop a conscience. They forced the law.

What is required now is the same refusal. Not nostalgia — the postwar settlement had its own brutal exclusions that deserve their own honest accounting and have not yet received it. But the animating conviction of that settlement: that broadly shared prosperity is not a happy accident but a political choice, that the economy serves the people or it serves no legitimate purpose, and that the people retain the right, at any moment they choose to exercise it, to demand a different set of rules.

The machine that grinds people into precarity was not handed down from a mountain. It was built by identifiable human beings making identifiable choices that could, at any moment, be made differently.

The only question — the one that every generation eventually has to answer for itself — is whether we intend to let it keep running.