Reagan's Most Damaging Impact

Ronald Reagan did a lot of damage to our nation, but perhaps his attack on labor unions resulted in the greatest harm to the average American. It set the stage for the massive chasm between the haves and the have nots and began the steady march of the American Middle Class into extinction.

Unions were very important to our having a stable and responsible government. For all their warts and corruption, they were a way for the blue collar working class to organize and create leaders capable of making the economic and social issues of the blue collar and middle classes of America known to Congress and the legislatures and making sure that the blue collar and middle class interests were respected.

After Reagan and the onset of globalization combined with urestrained laissez faire capitalism, they evaporated as an effective force and their leadership lost the clout it had previously wielded. In essence, Reagan created a power vacuum and the Republicans were ready, willing and able to fill that power vacuum with the religious right. The blue collar class disintegrated and descended into poverty, the middle class began to melt away.

The result was that the religious right organized the lesser educated into a significant political machine which blamed all of our economic and social woes upon our moral decadence and delivered their votes to the Republican party free of all strings pertaining to the economic interests of these economic classes. The result has been that the Republican party has been able to win elections by obtaining the campaign funding from the economic elite while purchasing votes from the lower economic classes by pushing social agenda issues which do nothing to improve the economic standard of living of these groups.

The consequence has been that we have seen a massive polarization of wealth, destruction of affordable access to some of the basic needs of our citizens such as health care and the ability to improve their economic standing by putting college education out of reach for their children. In other words, the loss of organized leadership on economic issues previously provided by labor unions has been disasterous for America. We may not have liked how they behaved. We may have thought they encouraged less than productive behavior to employers.

But it should be clear that without some way of organizing and providing economic leadership to the working class Americans, we all would suffer and we have. As the religious right has repeatedly stepped over the boundaries protecting individual liberty in America, and the average American has become weary of listening to debate after debate as to the morality or immorality of abortion and same sex marriage and unions, this economic strata has become available and is looking for something other than religion to rally to and provide leadership.
Political dominance in the coming decade is going to hang upon which party or group successfully manages to organize the working and middle-class economic strata. So far that has been a culture war that the Democrats have been losing to the Republicans since Reagan -- although before his Presidency was eclipsed by sex scandals, Clinton provided an alternative leadership which reached out to this group. The Republicans under Bush, however, consolidated their control of this economic stratum via the Christian Evangelicals. Now, the ball is once again in the air and the fate of America for the first half of the 21st Century lays in the balance.