There’s a few rules if you want your system, whether it’s a club, corporation, religion, country or civilization to be stable.
The most important however is that you must not give power to those who want to change your system.
Simple enough.
Now, New Deal/Post-war Liberalism did a few things right. One of them was high marginal tax rates and another was high estate taxes (though not high enough.)
But the new Deal made a devil’s deal: it allowed large corporations to exist. This wasn’t, actually, FDR’s first choice, but he was having trouble fixing the Great Depression, and this is where the solution set wound up.
You may have a 93% marginal tax rate, but the people who control corporations use the corporation as their waldo: it does for them what they want. So the corporations had vast amounts of money and power, and they were the ones who spent vigorously, for example, on endowing chairs in business schools and economic faculties and creating conservative think tanks and buying politicians and so forth. This stuff mattered: Milton Friedman, the economist, is the godfather of neoliberalism.
It’s control of money which matters for power. If I’ve sworn a vow of perpetual poverty, but I run a religion or corporation which controls billions obviously I’ve got the power of money, even if I live in a cell, which I may not, given that the corporation or religion may be paying my living expenses.
The rich and powerful who controlled most of America’s corporations hated FDR and the New Deal. They called him “that man” and they worked endlessly against him. In personal combat they were generally defeated. He did cut a deal with them, but overall he won most of his battles and they could only drag their heels: his personal power and popularity was immense.
But once he was gone, they could work to undermine everything he had built, and they did. It didn’t even take them that long: under the first Congress after FDR, for example, supervisors and foremen lost the right to join unions, which was a hammer blow. (Truman interposed his veto, it was over-ridden.)
Bretton Woods ended in 71, Reagan was elected and the rest is history. Elon Musk is talking about getting rid of the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) by attacking its constitutionality, and with so many Republicans on the Supreme Court, who knows, it might happen.
If you want your system to last, you can’t let those who hate it have power.
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