Occupy May Day. Financial District, San Francisco, California 2012. Flickr/davitydave. Some rights reserved.In their book, Deeply Divided, McAdam and Kloos argue that the bipartisan and centrist post-World War II political period was simply an anomaly driven by a relative lack of social movements, McCarthyism, and reduced income inequality.
Using historical time series data, the authors attempt to demonstrate that political polarization, such as the United States finds itself presently mired in, is the Congressional modus operandi and stands in stark contrast to the post-war period advocacy of their median voter theory. While I agree with the authors that the post-World War II political period did find itself at the confluence of several events that mitigated social movements and therefore political polarization, I contend that this is not simply an anomaly but a predictable cycle, reinforced by World War II but driven by the underlying power struggle between labor and capital.
To demonstrate, allow me to fill in some gaps. McAdam and Kloos explain the relative rise of capital and the corresponding fall of labor well. I’ve personally watched the last labor stronghold, unions in the federal work force, become poisoned by the policies advanced by capital’s staunchest ally, the Republican Party. But as the current social elite work to remake the political and economic system in capital’s image, they have unknowingly or possibly greedily set the stage for labor’s rebirth. In other words, by excluding labor from the political and economic process, capital has set a course for the revival of the labor movement.
