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Michael Meeropol: Debunking Trump's Slogan

Do you know who Patrick Buchanan is?  In many ways, he is a former incarnation of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.  He began his career as a political operative working for Richard Nixon, and became a well-known right-wing pundit on television in the 1970s before going to work in the Reagan White House during the 1980s.  In 1992, he challenged President George H.W. Bush in the Republican primaries.   In an attempt to build up Bush I’s bona fides with the right wing of the party (Reaganites mistrusted Bush I’s conservatism), Buchanan was given a prime time speaking slot at the 1992 Republican Convention.  In his speech he proclaimed that there was “culture war” in the United States. Bill and Hilary Clinton were identified with the “wrong side” and, in a backhanded compliment, Buchanan magnanimously proclaimed that “George Bush is on our side.” The negativity of the speech and the attempted demonization of the Clintons and the “side” of various issues they presumably represented caused some commentators to snarkily remark that the speech sounded better “in the original German!”Like Trump, Buchanan preached divisiveness and attacked the Republican establishment.  In 2000 he actually ran for President on a third party ticket.

I watched a recent interview with him on CNN in which he claimed that his 1992 speech “got it right.”  He doubled down on an argument he has been making for decades:   The United States in 1960 was a wonderful country. Yes, he admitted, there were “problems related to civil rights” but that things were improving.   According to him, beginning in the 1960s, the country went to Hell in a hand basket.

This struck me as a great example of a “big lie.”  The right wing has a story that the United States was a great country until the leftists got influential through the Civil Rights, anti-war, hippie, women’s lib and gay lib movements. Right wing politicians have demonized the movements of the 1960s and since, even as they pay lip service to Dr. Martin Luther King. Too many ignorant people ignore that contradiction and willing consume the rotten red meat fed to them.

But there is a real story. I saw it myself and I have studied it. I even taught about it during my years in the classroom. In 1960, I was 17 years old.   I lived a comfortable middle class lifestyle – privileged with my white skin. I went off to college that Fall seven months after the first sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. 10 years later, after four years of undergraduate education and six years of graduate school I got my first full time job. I watched the United States change dramatically from my teenage years through my first decade of employment, and I can confidently assert that the United States in 1970 and later in 1980 was a much better country in all aspects than it was in 1960. 

It’s not just the obvious ---  that African Americans were granted de jure civil rights and voting rights as a result of the struggles that began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Let us remember that black people were still being lynched in the South during the 1960s. 

(According to Tuskegee Institute, there were three recorded lynchings of blacks between 1961 and 1964.   See http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html for the detailed data.)

Whereas lynchings of whites had virtually ceased by the end of World War II, 18 African Americans had been lynched between 1945 and 1960.)

In addition, there were a number of prominent murders of Civil Rights workers as well as the terrorist bombing of a Birmingham church which left four young girls dead.  The progress of the decade of the 1960s was bought with the blood of innocents.

The improvements between 1960 and 1980 included the fact that women began to achieve equality in the work place and before the law.  This accelerated after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later with the emergence of second wave feminism in the 1970s. 

The improvement in the lives of black Americans and women were dramatic and significant.   But equally important was the fact that the economy as a whole began to work for the majority of the people, not just the comfortable white middle class of which I was a member.

Here are some important statistics.   In 1960, infant mortality in the United States was over 20 per 1000 live births.  That number has fallen to less than 7, 50 years later.   More importantly, it had fallen to12 by 1980, 20 years after Buchanan tells us the United States started falling apart.   The percentage of the population living in poverty was above 20% in 1960 and it began to fall dramatically that decade.   By 1980, it was down to 15%   Perhaps the most dramatic example of what one writer called America’s Hidden Success was the fact that elderly poverty fell much more than for the nation as a whole.   (The book  America’s Hidden Success:  A Reassessment of Twenty Years of Public Policy  was written by political scientist John Schwarz and published in 1983 by W. W. Norton.)  This is in large part due to the passage of Medicare and Medicaid which didn’t exist in 1960.    Even as the national poverty rate has not fallen much since 1980, the poverty rate among the elderly has continue to fall.   It was close to 30% in the early 1960s and had fallen to 15% by the end of the 1970s.  By 2010 it was down below 10%, even as youth poverty stopped falling after 1980.   If the numbers quoted are not obvious, note that elderly poverty was higher than for the nation as a whole in 1960.  Now it is significantly lower.   Hunger has also fallen dramatically since 1960, making its greatest gains in the two decades before 1980.  This was in large part due to the dramatic expansion of the food stamps program during the 1970s.

The United States is a much better country than it was in 1960.   Buchanan and Trump want to turn the clock back, but if we the people are armed with the truth and make sure our friends and neighbors learn those truths, we can keep our country from going down the dangerous path to Mussolini and Hitler style fascism.

(For those interested in actually following the statistics described here, check out http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-245.pdf  for information on poverty rates.  For information on life expectancy check out http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_11.pdf

Finally, for Buchanan’s assertions see http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/07/02/buchanan-my-1992-convention-speech-about-clintons-still-holds.cnn)

Michael Meeropol is professor emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. He is the author (with Howard Sherman) of Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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