Please refer to part 1 of this series here:
https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-changing-political-power.html
~~ written by dmorista ~~
The Changing Political Power Configuration of the United States: Part 2
by dmorista
The Ultra Reactionary / Land Speculator / ‘Right to Work’ / Armaments Production / Sun & Surf Migration; and its role in the Ruling Class Offensive against the New Deal / Great Society Coalition
Posted as a supplement to the New Confederacy Articles posted by Collectivist Action.
In the immediate Post-WW 2 era the U.S. was by far the most powerful, most prosperous, and most influential society on Earth. Of course, to a large extent this had to come to an end. The other major societies, all of which suffered from one level or another of destruction and devastation during the war, recovered and after a number of years became formidable competitors, friends, and foes. The dire situation that pertains to the U.S. now, with a greatly diminished global position and severe internal problems and the threat of domestic conflict and even Civil War, is a stunning reversal of the situation from 1945 - 1975. During the 30 years following WW 2 the working class of the U.S. enjoyed the greatest prosperity and levels of upward class mobility in the history of the country. However, behind the scenes some of the factors that would bring on the current period of crisis and growing right-wing power (along with a growth in left-wing organizing) were already developing.
In 1940 the dominant political force in the U.S. was the New Deal Coalition. The American working class was alert, mobilized and had a feeling of empowerment they had never really achieved at any time. The New Deal Coalition fought out a series of compromises in which the ruling class made serious concessions and actually had to pay significant taxes, for the first and so far for the only time. Those compromises were meant to save Capitalism, and they achieved that; but within the strictures of Capitalism the working people of the U.S. enjoyed some 40+ years of the greatest prosperity and the most significant socioeconomic and cultural advancements in the entire history of the country. Many of the advances were issues that the Populist Party, the IWW, and the various other unions and the leftist political parties including the Communist, Socialist, Socialist Labor Parties and various anarchist organizations had been demanding and proposing for decades. These reforms included the 40 hour week, overtime pay for work beyond 40 hours, the abolition of child labor, the right to organize unions, and safety rules for industrial and other business operations, among other issues.
The largest House delegations in 1940 were from New York with 45, Pennsylvania with 33, Illinois with 26, Ohio and California both with 23. The migration to the West had already cost Pennsylvania 3 members of their delegation, and both Ohio and Illinois had lost 1 member since the 1910 / 1920 levels. In 1940 Texas had a delegation of 21 members, and Florida had a delegation of only 6. Georgia had a delegation of 10 members, Alabama had a delegation of 9, and even Mississippi and Arkansas both had larger delegations than Florida did with 7 members each.
The attack on the New Deal Coalition began before Roosevelt had even died. Roosevelt was clearly in poor health and at the 1944 Democratic Convention there was a struggle over who would get the Vice-Presidential nomination. Henry A. Wallace, a dedicated New Dealer who had served as the Secretary of Agriculture from 1933 - 1940 during FDR’s first two terms, was the Vice President from 1941 - 1945. The progressive forces within the Democratic Party wanted him to get the nomination again and the mostly Southern Right-Wing Dixiecrats wanted him out. Of course, Harry Truman, the choice of the Southern Right-Wing Dixiecrats actually won the nomination; but there was an attempt to put Wallace’s name into contention. None other than Claude Pepper, then a young and dedicated New Dealer and a House Member from Florida, fought to get to the podium to put Wallace’s name up for a nomination vote. That was a vote that Wallace most likely would have won, but agents of the reactionaries physically blocked Pepper as he tried to push his way to the podium. He arrived at the podium a couple of minutes late and the session closed for the day without Henry A. Wallace being nominated for the Vice-Presidential slot.
In the intervening decades, 84 seats in the U.S. House shifted from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and the West from 1940 to 2021. This is significant politically, as the America of 1940 was the America of the New Deal, when the country had a highly organized and mobilized working class. That working class supported three active leftist political parties (Communist, Socialist, and Socialist Labor), parties that held numerous elective offices on the local and state level, and that were very active in union organizing and other socioeconomic mobilization work. This empowerment of working people was a situation that the always large far-right factions of the U.S. ruling class were very unhappy about; even if that most severe and ruthless part of the ruling class was out-of-power during the New Deal period.
Major changes in U.S. politics took place beginning in the late 1940s; as extremely conservative business interests began their decades-long offensive against the New Deal, the unions, and anybody perceived to be on the left politically. These changes were, to a significant degree, made possible by this ongoing shift of the population, and the move of political power to more conservative / reactionary places since 1940 / 1960. Here we have to distinguish between the general populace in the South and the West and the elites and ruling classes of those areas. Many of the working people were supporters of the New Deal, the unions, and the 3 major leftist political parties (Communist, Socialist, and Socialist Labor). The ruling class in the states of the Old Confederacy, and in most of the West, were extremely right-wing.
The Southern and Western Capitalist Classes had benefited greatly from the public investments of the New Deal programs, the World War 2 industrial developments and investments, and by the mid 1950s from Federal Government expenditures on highways, airports, armaments, and new technologies. These expenditures were made nationwide, but were skewed towards the South and the West. In effect, the much more heavily unionized working class of the Northeast, the Great Lakes States, and the industrialized Midwest were taxed to fund the infrastructural and industrial investments largely made in the South and the West. These investments provided the basis for the rapid economic growth of the South and the West and their development of mostly non-union industries. The New Dealers had planned to replace a large part of the Southern ruling elites, and foster a new more progressive set of elites, as part of the process of Federal investments. But the urgency of World War 2’s demands on industrial production meant that political questions were largely put aside, and both the South and the West garnered huge investments in their industrial capacities.
There was a massive swing to the right in U.S. politics that started immediately after, or even during the waning days of, WW 2. At first this was focused on rolling back the governmental institutions of the New Deal and hobbling the unions and the rights of workers to organize. At the same time military and covert actions capabilities were reorganized and strengthened to fit the role of the U.S. as the Global Hegemonic Capitalist Power. 1947 was a key year in this process with the passage of both the National Security Act (establishing the CIA and reorganizing the military) and the Taft-Hartley Act (that put severe restrictions on union activities, it was passed over Truman’s veto). The U.S. ruling class was, however, seriously worried about what would happen when the over 16 million men in the military returned to civilian life. Many among the elites feared a return to depression era conditions and looked with concern on a working class, many of whom had participated in the Great Strikes of the 1930s and 1940s, who were returning to civilian life with extensive military training and combat experience. To head off a major confrontation with the American working class, the Congress had passed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (better known as the G.I. Bill) that was in effect until 1956. That bill provided funding for university and vocational training, financing for purchasing houses, and other benefits for veterans.
With these programs in place the U.S. entered its period of greatest prosperity that lasted from 1945 until the early to mid 1970s. While the great majority of the common people continued on pursuing their private lives, with just a hiccup or two such as the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements, deep events were in development. In the background the machinations of the wealthy, and the corporate organizations they owned and controlled, worked assiduously to roll back the socioeconomic and political gains of the New Deal and Great Society eras. The move of population and economic activity to the South and West was a part of this overall transformation. Basic changes in the conditions of Global Capitalism took place that by the early 1970s saw the end of the period of greatest power and legitimacy for the U.S. (variously defined by some of the major theorists as Strong Hegemony, Uncontested Hegemony, World Power, or the period dominated by Goods Producing Capital). That U.S. position in the Global Capitalist Hierarchy was replaced during the 1970s by a lesser level of power and legitimacy (variously defined by some of the major theorists as Weak Hegemony, Contested Hegemony, Delegitimation, or the occurrence of the Signal Crisis and the dominance of Finance Capital). I discussed these issues at greater length here at Leftist Politics previously.1 The attempts by the most progressive faction of the ruling class, the Roosevelt / Kennedy tradition working through the Democratic Party, to make an accommodation with working people that was more generous and to reduce the massive outlays on armaments and Imperialist Adventures, was turned back by the most extreme right-wing elements of the ruling class.
So as time passed, particularly after the early 1970s the position of U.S. based Capital changed. The U.S. ruling class gradually lost the refuge of the domestic economy of the U.S. The goods producing sector, that had been based primarily in the N.E. quadrant of the country, declined inexorably. Finance Capital with its speculation, swindles, and various market bubbles, became the dominant Capitalism in the U.S. The imposition of this type of Capitalism on the U.S. featured extremely aggressive Conservative activists, who looted the public sector, enriching themselves by stealing the "commons".2 This process over time destroyed the American Version of a Social Democracy that began in earnest in the New Deal era and that was extended with the Great Society.
Of course these regional differences were not the only reason these unfavorable changes took place. In fact the state that had the highest per capita membership in the Socialist Party, back in the period of the early 1900s through the New Deal, was Oklahoma. But nonetheless one major trend was for a population move to the old Confederacy "Deep South" states. They were in general easier places to develop far right political institutions and alliances. That effort built on the long tradition of controlling the White Working Class by pitting them against African American Working Class people. The other major beneficiaries of the move of population from the Northeast and the Midwest regions over the entire span from 1910 - 2020 were the Western States. The Federal Government during the entire 110 year period had invested billions of dollars in; Water control and management infrastructure; huge mileages of Interstate and other Federal Highways, and other infrastructural projects and economic investments. Early on dams and railroad construction was subsidized by the Federal Government. By the 1920s road construction in that large, and still very lightly inhabited region was subsidized. During and after WW 2 the major Federal investments in the aircraft industry and in other armaments production, and the subsidies for building refineries and pipelines were major contributors to both Southern and Western population growth and urban development. Trucking, aircraft production and civil aviation, the computer industry, and high technology armaments production all benefited the South and the West far more than they did the Northeast and the Midwest. The growth and development of these industries, that contrasted with the decline in the old line heavy industrial businesses, drew population to the South and the West. The warmer weather of the South and the Southwest, and the Natural Beauty and wilderness of the West, were attractive; but without the growth of these new industries the population of the Northeast and the Midwest would not have decamped in such large numbers.
Extremist right wingers played a major role in the modern development of the South and the West. The business figures involved in founding companies in the U.S. have been uniformly far-right wing, this had been true of the old line heavy industries in the Midwest and Northeast, but over time the New Deal and working class militancy changed the balance of power between employers and employees. The emerging Oil, Armaments, Trucking, Agribusiness, Computer and High Tech, and Biotechnology Business moguls have been pretty much a bunch of reactionaries too. However, at this point the demographic changes, and the terminal decline of the U.S. socioeconomic system are driving a major change in the political arrangements in the U.S. That is a major reason why the Republicans have introduced nearly 400 laws in state legislatures to suppress the voting rights of Democratic Party leaning voters. Voter suppression is part of a complex web of social and political control operations. Working people are “kept in their place” by rising prices, debt, lack of guaranteed employment, the harsh web of laws and the massive prison Gulag. The Democrats are little better as concerns these issues and have played a major role in implementing the unfavorable changes in class relations. As Gore Vidal once said "the U.S. has one political party 'The Property Party' with 2 right wings."
Still Joe Biden, who eked out a narrow Electoral College Victory while losing ground in the U.S. House of Representatives has certainly been more progressive, than the evil Trump would have ever been. Biden did energize and implement a vigorous vaccination program for Covid-19, and managed to move the American Rescue Plan through without so much as one Republican vote. We have already been fleeced of $15 Trillion by the Bush / Obama / Trump tax cuts for the rich. And the real money was the $50 - $100 Trillion given to the Rich by the Federal Reserve Bank over the last 20 years without any push back from either party. Biden has, so far, proposed and implemented part of a very mild and completely inadequate Keynesian Stimulus economic program of which the American Rescue Plan was already passed, and the Infrastructure Plan is in the congress. Jack Rasmus presented a serious analysis of the Biden Stimulus plans, and concluded that they don’t amount to as much as advertised and are not big enough to actually stimulate the economy, but rather serve as amelioration plans, he also analyzed the changes in the economy and how those changes have affected working people.3
One of the important net effects of the Federal infrastructural support for the South and the West has been to move the main population of the U.S. from the land that has the most capacity to support people, to much more marginal areas that have either unresolvable water shortages, are prone to more frequent and more severe storms, need massive amounts of air conditioning and the electrical generation capacity to run those air conditioners, suffer from massive and increasing wildfire problems, or any of a number of other vulnerabilities. No thought was ever given to the long-term consequences of this massive population transfer, and the costs, to some degree hastened by Global Warming, are now coming due and there seem to be no plans to redress the incapacity of the infrastructure to accommodate the increasing population.
(Map 6 Sources: “How Congressional Representation Has Changed Over the Past 50 Years”, “Map 2”, Mar 6, 2014, Geoffrey Skelley, Sabato's Crystal Ball, UVA Center for Politics, at <https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/how-congressional-representation-has-changed-over-the-past-50-years/ >: & “Historical Apportionment Data (1910-2020)”, April 26, 2021, U.S. Census Bureau, at <https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/apportionment-data-text.html>. Updated and modified by Author).
The Changes as a result of the 2020 Census
and Reapportionment
As for the Electoral College Vote, with the changes reported by the Census Bureau, if the same states went for a Democrat in 2024 or later that did in 2020, the Democratic candidate would garner 303 Electoral Votes rather than 306. 5 States that went Democratic lost 1 electoral vote each, (New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, and California) but 2 gained 1 electoral vote each (Oregon and Colorado); that gives us a net loss of 3 Electoral Votes. More critically, if the Republicans retake control of the election systems in Georgia and Arizona, as they are very seriously endeavoring to do, and can deliver those Electoral Votes to the Republican Candidate: the balance would still be 276 for the Democrat and 262 for the Republican.
The balance of power in the House is much more responsive to these changes. If the Democrats can field viable and hard driving candidates in some of the urban areas in the South they should be able to offset the changes. The current House is divided 218 Democrats and 212 Republicans, with 5 vacant seats. One vacant seat in Louisiana will have a Democrat placed to replace a Democrat who went to Washington D.C. to serve in the Biden Administration, that increases the Democratic majority to 7: 219 Dems and 212 Republicans with 4 remaining vacancies.
Here is an early National Vote Map for the Electoral College. It focuses on the 2024 Election, and for that purpose reflects the new Electoral Vote totals for each State and the District of Columbia, as they have been modified using the 2020 Census data. It is also divided into 16 Strongly Democratic Leaning states and the District of Columbia with 209 Electoral Votes, 20 Strongly Republican Leaning States with 125 Electoral Votes, and 14 Competitive States with 204 Electoral Votes. Because of ever changing demographic shifts, the Republicans have no choice but to use the most aggressive voter suppression and election fraud techniques possible to win and, at the same time, maintain even a charade of any shred of democracy in the Presidential system.
Map 8: The Electoral Votes of Each State For the 2024 Presidential Election. Using 2020 Census Changes: And a Division into Strongly Democratic Leaning, Competitive, and Strongly Republican Leaning States.
The 2020 Presidential Election saw a major disruption in the ongoing Republican Voter Suppression and Election Fraud Operations; that had been growing in importance and virulence since the 2000 “win” by “Bush the Younger”, granted to him by the Supreme Court. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted (in many cases forced the hand of) a great number of State Legislatures to sanction mail-in ballots. Despite major efforts at voter suppression, the formerly reliably far-right Republican states, Georgia and Arizona were the sites of close election wins by Biden and, in both cases, by the two senatorial candidates (one of whom had won earlier in Arizona in 2018, but both of whom from Georgia won in the January 5th run-off election). The balance of political power, as far as electoral politics is concerned for the Presidency, lies in 15 “Battle Ground Areas”, 13 states and 2 congressional districts, 1 each in Maine and Nebraska.
Table 1: Presidential Vote Totals, Percentages, and Margins from the 2020 Election: with the Modified Electoral Vote Numbers for the States, as of the 2020 Census
The electoral balance in some of the Key Battleground States is very close. The margins in Arizona and Georgia were razor thin. In Georgia the Secretary of State, Raffensperger, dutifully removed some 198,351 Democratic Party leaning voters from the State’s voter rolls in 2019.4 It turned out not to be enough, and he declined to commit overt fraud to save the state for the Trumpista forces. There are reports that Republican Operatives had already purged Democratic Leaning voters from the voter rolls in the following states, and in the following numbers, by mid 2020:Ohio — 432,000; North Carolina — 576,534; Arizona — 258,000; Wisconsin — 99,000 (with an additional 232,000 listed for purge).5 Trump won in Ohio by 475,669; in North Carolina by 74,483; Trump lost Arizona by 10,457, Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,608 votes. Nationwide 16,696,470 voters were purged from the rolls from 2014 - 2016 supposedly for moving, though that was twice the number of people who actually moved according to the Census Bureau. There is a long history of removing Democratic-leaning voters from the rolls, the big operation in 2016 was InterState Crosscheck, that involved checking names against one another from the voter rolls in different states. The 30 states with Republican Secretaries of State removed 7 million voters from the rolls, most of the time when the names were not the same, with different middle names and sometimes different though similar spelling. In Ohio, in 2016, 100,000 mail-in votes were thrown away because there was only one, rather than two stamps on the envelope. There was a box the size of one stamp but in the instructions it required that two stamps had to be used.6 So even Ohio might easily have been pushed into the Trump Column by the purges and other measures in 2020.
In Arizona a 4th “recount” took place of the Maricopa County Presidential Vote. Maricopa County, where Phoenix and many of its suburbs are located, is by far the dominant location for voters and votes in the state.
The Presidency was won by Joe Biden, in the Electoral College, by a margin of 306 to 232. With the changes in the allocation of Electoral Votes that margin would have gone down to 303 to 235 If the far-right Rethugs can take back control of the electoral process in both Georgia and Arizona (not a foregone conclusion btw) that reduces the Democratic Electoral Vote count to 276, still a win but by a pretty narrow margin. The two states, won by Biden, with the lowest margin of victory in the actual “citizen votes” were Wisconsin at 0.6% and Pennsylvania at 1.2%. Clearly the Republicans will target those two states for a major effort. In both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania the Governor is a Democrat and both houses of the legislature are Republican controlled. However neither in Wisconsin, nor in Pennsylvania, do these state legislatures have a veto-proof majority.
There was an announcement on April 26, 2021 that New York State lost a member of the U.S. House, due to a difference of 89 people in the 2020 Census Count. This was just the latest example of the decades-long shift of U.S. population from the Northeast and Midwest to the West and South. Political critics and operatives in New York thought that, if the State of New York had taken a more active and harder effort to defend their House Delegation, the loss of that member of the House of Representatives could have been avoided.
Notes and References:
1). “Long-Term Global Trends Affecting the U.S.: Analysis of Historical Global Developments and their Relevance to the Internal Situation of the United States”, Dmorista, Sept 20, 2020, Leftist Politics, at < https://leftist---politics.... >: “Strong versus Weak Hegemony” comes from Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age, Joshua Goldstein, 1988, New Haven, Yale University Press: “Uncontested versus Contested Hegemony” comes from The Modern World-System; Vol 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Immanuel Wallerstein, 1974, San Francisco, University of California Press, 2011, original date of publication 1974: “World Power vs Delegitimation” comes from “Long Cycles and World-Systems: Theoretical Research Programs”, Table “Long-Cycle Theory and the Struggle for Global Leadership: 1494 – 1994”, Christopher Chase Dunn and Hiroko Inoue, 2016, IROWS Working Paper #115, Institute for Research on World-Systems, ( IROWS), University of California Riverside, at https://irows.ucr.edu/paper..., Per Modelski, 1987 Long Cycles in World Politics, George Modelski, 1987, Seattle, University of Washington Press: “Goods Producing Capital versus the Signal Crisis and the dominance of Finance Capital” comes from The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, Giovanni Arrighi, Verso, 1988 (New and Updated Edition edition, Verso, February 16, 2010).
2). For a relatively exhaustive discussion of this process see: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation, Thomas Frank, New York, Henry Holt, 2008.
3). “Biden’s Latest Tax Plan”-audio, March 29, 2021, jackrasmus, at < https://alternativevisions.... >: “Biden’s $1.8T Covid Relief Stimulus vs. FDR’s New Deal Stimulus”, April 1, 2021, jackrasmus, at < Critical_Hour_689_Seg_5.mp3 >: “Biden’s Infrastructure Plan”, April 2, 2021, jackrasmus, at < https://alternativevisions.... >: “Union Labor’s Great Detour: 1947-2021”– audio, April 20, 2021, jackrasmus, at < https://alternativevisions.... >.
4). “Stealing Georgia: Raffensperger is No Hero: The Real Story of Jim Crow Tactics in the Senate Runoff Race”, Jan 4, 2021, Greg Palast, gregpalast.com, at
< https://www.gregpalast.com/... is-no-hero/ >: “Sec. of State Raffensperger Speaks with Forked Tongue: The Georgia Fraud Story You Haven’t Heard” Jan 3, 2021, Greg Palast, gregpalast.com, at < https://www.gregpalast.com/... >: “How to Rig an Election: an Interview With Greg Palast” Aug 21, 2020, Charlotte Dennett, Counterpunch, at < https://www.counterpunch.or... >.
5). “How to Rig an Election: an Interview With Greg Palast” Aug 21, 2020, Charlotte Dennett, Counterpunch, at < https://www.counterpunch.or... >.
6). Ibid
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