n You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, historian Howard Zinn brings up a question he frequently asks of new acquaintances: “How did you come by the peculiar ideas you now have?” This is well worth asking, for it goes to the heart of a person’s experiences, motivations, and convictions.

 Dr. Zinn is referring, of course, to political and social ideas insofar as they differ from mainstream opinion.  For me, the move towards a leftist view of history and politics was a gradual process that began when I was still a child.

With barely an eighth-grade education between them, my immigrant parents instinctively knew what most people do not learn even after they’ve taken the most advanced degrees.  They taught me that the world is a vast, complex place.  Oceans of ideas and information wash over us almost daily, and we cannot hope to comprehend and synthesize these diverse, often contradictory, torrents into a single “correct” understanding of the world we live in.

If we are fortunate, we may discover a set of ideas that acts as a framework for analysis, but we must remember that this rubric will be an imperfect one at best.  And we must avoid the arrogance of thinking that everyone shares (and benefits from) the application of our belief systems.  As long as the human animal is capable of error, we must have the generosity of spirit necessary to let people decide what’s best for themselves and their children.  Err we must, so we should at least do it in the service of humanity.

Growing up in Hitler’s Germany, my parents saw the horrible cost of intolerance.  Today in America, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan are bringing the scourge of racism to a younger generation.  Rallies, hate speeches, and an epidemic of black church bombings are its most virulent features, but it doesn’t stop there; it’s already filtering into more mainstream areas.  

During last year’s Republican National Conference, concessionnaires made a killing selling T-shirts to the delegates; their message was unequivocal: “Intolerance if a Beautiful Thing.”  The year before that, at a federal employees convention, a group of enterprising agents printed and issued “nigger hunting permits,”—much to the chagrin of the African-Americans in attendance.

It is not my intention to recite a litany of hate crimes or to indict a culture; I simply wish to suggest that we should recognize the fact that we do not all share the same perceptions, experiences, or interests.  When I was still in grammar school, I happened across a Fourth of July speech delivered by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York.  There, he told his white listeners:

“The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.  The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.  You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

As a patriotic ten-year-old, I was shocked and astonished by these words.  For young and old alike, the ideas of liberty, equality, and the common values that bind Americans together comprise a sort of secular religion. Uncertainty is disturbing, and never more so than when one’s controlling assumptions begin to break down.  But it is also a watershed; it forces a re-examination of everything we have been taught.  This is why newspapers and television so insistently shield us from the “divisive” issues of race and class—and why, in time, I came to view the media with a jaundiced eye. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

The next years passed uneventfully.  I went to high school, played in a rock band, dated (perhaps not enough), drank (undoubtedly too much), and lived the robust life of an American teenager.  By the early 1980s, Reagan’s peculiar brand of patriotic conservativism had taken root, thriving in the hospitable soil of recession, inflation, and eroding self-confidence: This bloated sapling bore strange fruit indeed.

After razing the Vietnamese town of  Bentre in 1968, an American major explained: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”  The Economic Recovery Act of 1981 seemed to be predicated on the same logic:  In order to improve the lives of the majority of Americans, it would be necessary to dramatically increase the fortunes of a wealthy minority.  Massive tax cuts for the rich, an historically unprecedented military budget, and the government-sponsored breaking of labor unions became the order of the day.  The gains were “impressive” by anyone’s reckoning. As the decade drew to a close, 5 percent of the population owned 94 percent of the nation’s wealth, with the richest 1 percent owning half of that.  Leveraging and corporate buyouts had gutted much of the country’s manufacturing base, and with it went the high-wage, blue-collar economy that had existed since the Second World War.  The living standards of working people began to decline, and they have been falling ever since.

As I began college in the fall of 1983, I did not yet perceive the implications of these changes, much less predict the social upheavals that would result.  I remember feeling alienated by the febrile patriotism and the endless paeans to American life that were promulgated from Washington, and parroted by the newspapers, but at 17, I lacked the analytical skill to interpret hard numbers and recognize trends.

In my second year of college, I began to major in politics—a boondoggle known as political science everywhere but in the rareified environment of New York University.  Eight of the required twenty-eight credits were taken up with primer courses in Government.  One of them was taught by Lawrence Mead, a political conservative who had been a speechwriter for Henry Kissinger during the halcyon days of the Nixon administration.  Ironically (but not surprisingly) he distrusted the media almost as much as I did, reserving the greater part of his wrath for the Washington Post.

Part of the required reading was a textbook on the American political process.  The section on pluralism contained a diagram that expressed the traditional antagonism between corporate interests and organized labor, with the government mediating (fairly, it was inferred) between the two.  In time I would come to recognize that this was an illustration of Hegel’s concept of the Neutral State, where, as an impartial arbiter of class interests, the government would insure that equity and fairness prevailed.  Two things bothered me, however:  First, the diagram suggested that business and labor confronted each other as equals—that they were evenly matched in terms of resources, power, and influence.  Second, it assumed that the government did not take a side in the struggle, somehow remaining above the fray while two selfish titans waged war on the public interest.

The problem with the model was that things just didn’t work that way.  Three years earlier, I remembered, President Reagan had used the power of government to fire striking air traffic controllers, an act which crippled their union and sent an unmistakable message to organized labor in general.  He called the actions of the strikers “illegal.”

I recently discovered that while he was governor of California, Reagan was equally disdainful of the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott.  Arrogantly gorging himself on grapes that had been picked by exploited labor, he called the UFW’s actions “immoral.”  Forcing thousands of men and women to work long hours in the blistering sun without paying them enough to support their families was fine, but it was wrong, immoral—perhaps “un-American”—for them to fight for higher wages and better working conditions.

Agribusiness could have its lobbies, combines, and covenants; it could intimidate organizers, rig elections, and buy the sympathies of local politicians and police, but the UFW could not mount a public campaign to discourage people from buying grapes from growers who were using illegal tactics to keep their workers from organizing.  If the Great Communicator had been the governor of Alabama during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, he probably would have made it a point to ride on segregated buses while denouncing Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and the SCLC.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again.  Back in the spring of 1985, only that textbook—and possibly Ronald Reagan—disturbed my simple faith.  Later, in the Tammiment Labor Library high over Washington Square, I discovered the sordid history of American labor relations.

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