Why the Right Complaining About the Left Wanting to "Re-Write US History" is Blatant Hypocrisy

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You hear right wing pundits constantly complaining about how the left wants to portray the US as being based on white supremacy. And you know what perhaps that is an oversimplification; yes it was a part of American history but to say that racism is why we enjoy the standard of living that we do know is completely untrue. We took lands from the Native Americans but there wasn't a thriving infrastructure (there could very well have been if the Native population wasn't decimated in the 16th century by smallpox, but that's another story) and while slavery existed in part of the US, that part of the US isn't wealthier than the rest. But the narrative that the right has pushed for decades is that what made America founded on and made great was a system of free markets unregulated by the government:

I know this looks like typical cold war anti-USSR propaganda but it was commissioned by Alfred P. Sloan after the government passed a bunch of labor protection laws under the Roosevelt administration.


Well, first the idea that's what it was founded on is utter BS and this idea that an "unregulated economy"="free trade" is a farce because without anti-trust laws, monopolies will completely dictate the market. You may talk about how bad it is when a government controls the market, imagine how bad it will be when the entity that controls the markets only function is to exploit it. But anyway, during the age of "Laze Fair capitalism" (1865-1895) you had rampant poverty and exploitation with factory workers working 14 hours a day in appalling conditions earning barely enough to scrape by. It's true that many people did come to the US seeking a better life than what they had in Europe but it was called the "Gilded Age" for a reason.

What turned America into the nation with the greatest standard of living on Earth in the first half of the 20th century was government intervention (not the "nanny state" but as the representative of the popular will of the people; "big us") during the progressive era from 1895-1920. Like the Gilded Age, the progressive era saw huge economic growth but it was growth in a way that improved the standards of living for most Americans and what we always have to keep in mind is that we don't exist for the economy; the economy exists for us. But after the Second World War, corporate elites began to reign back in their economic power by using the perceived threat of Communism from the USSR.

Well first of all, the threat to the West posed by the Soviet Block was blown out of proportion from the get go. Most of us have an idea that communism is inherently expansionist and seeks to completely overtake the world, uniting all people under one government. While this was laid out in the Communist Manifesto and many leading figures in the Russian Revolution felt this way, ideas evolve over time and the notion of leading a global revolution of the proletariat faded away during the interwar period and by the end of WWII it was a fringe belief in the USSR. It is true that the USSR also did have an over powered military for a nation of its' economic strength but that was mostly motivated by a perceived need to defend their country after having been devastated by the Nazi invasion and in an ironic twist, the main reason that the USSR collapsed wasn't because of the failures of socialism but because their military budget bankrupted the country.

But the American right used the fear of communism into a "slippery slope" where any amount of government influence on the economy was a step closer to communism. So you had massive rollbacks on the tax rates on the richest Americans with the removal of regulations meant to protect consumers and employees. This fueled the growth in the wealth gap between the richest Americans and the rest of the population. This co-occurred with the US falling behind many other countries with similar per capita GDPs in terms of overall quality of life.

Human Development Index by Country
Human Development Index by Country
Why the Right Complaining About the Left Wanting to Re-Write US History is Blatant Hypocrisy

So is the idea that Americas' wealth is based on the oppression and exploitation of black and indigenous peoples completely false? Well no; the wealth acquired by the institute of slavery is what allowed many wealthy industrialists to hit the ground running when the Industrial Revolution reached the US. Now early industrialists were faced with a looming problem: the more efficient the means of production thanks to advances in technology, the greater the profit margin of the corporation but in an unregulated capitalist system with no minimum wage, the owners can exploit their workers harder while keeping their wages the same because the owners are now obtaining a greater share of the profits. Now, more goods are produced but because the working class is making as much as they did before, they can't afford the goods, this creates a crisis of overproduction. So if the owner class wants to keep their profits growing, they have to expand to other markets. During the gilded age, the industrialists could expand to the under developed parts of the country but post WW2 this wasn't an option. The US was fully industrialized so what the owner class did was keep the market here in the US but outsource to other countries and exploit cheap labor to keep production costs low and sell them in the US to keep sale prices high. This allowed the wealth gap in the US to expand while mitigating the crisis of overproduction. Note that I said "mitigate", not "eliminate". With production outsourced, people had to turn to another source of employment which caused the rise of the service based US economy to occur. A large part of this was the rise of the financial sector which was based in just moving money around but as we found out the hard way in 2008, running out of other people's money isn't a problem exclusive to "socialism".

So is the history of oppressions and exploitation of people of color the main reason the majority of Americans can enjoy the standard of living that we do? No BUT it is why the richest Americans can enjoy a higher standard of living and a far greater degree of opulence than the rest of us. And this is part of the reason why the right wing talking point that because "we support capitalism which doesn't care what skin color you are so the left are the real racists" is complete hogwash. The other part is because capitalism creates an economic incentive to foster racism to keep the working class divided so even if you don't think one race is superior to another yourself, if you support an ideology that fosters that mentality among others, you might as well be. In conclusion, while the claim that America was made great by the exploitation and oppression of people of color is an oversimplification, the idea that it was made great for anyone by the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality of self made men free of government support fails on all accounts.

Why the Right Complaining About the Left Wanting to "Re-Write US History" is Blatant Hypocrisy
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