Where was American democracy? Law was passed by an apparent ‘Iron Triangle’ of lobbyists, bureaucrats and tiny subcommittees. The Democrats (now essentially controlled from the north-east) reformed the House in such a way as to remove the old men from committee chairmanships, as from October 1974, when one of them became involved in a sex scandal involving a whore. The old system had been able to deliver votes, for instance for the Marshall Plan, but it could also be used to stop left-Democrat aims because experienced chairmen knew how to do it. A San Francisco congressman, Phil Burton — he supported Pol Pot in Cambodia, in 1976 — was backed by labour, but the result, with many now open committees, was that lobbyists flourished, and the small print of enormous legislative documents contained provisions to satisfy them, quite often unnoticed by scrutineers. It became impossible to get the budget in on time, and there had to be endless ‘Continuing Resolutions’ which simply enabled the government to go on spending as before: in 1974, $30bn more; between 1974 and 1980 spending (beyond defence) rose from $174bn to $444bn.
It was not surprising that so many Americans felt hostile to the whole process, and a radical, Christopher Lasch, wrote powerfully as to how a bureaucracy-dominating elite had taken power from people to run their own lives. He particularly despised the endless fuss made about cigarette-smoking — it started with a ban in Arizona, in 1973, on smoking in public buildings — but this was a frivolous period, the landmarks down. What Leszek Kołakowski called the politics of infantilism went ahead. Alvin Toffler pronounced in 1970 that the future would amount to endless leisure. For some, it did. In 1970, 1.5 million drew a disability pension, but 3 million in 1980; one tenth of the nation’s families was headed by a single woman, living on welfare. Paul Ehrlich in 1968 looked at The Population Bomb and asserted that there would be famine in the 1970s, and thought that pets should be killed, to save resources. One man made his name in the seventies with the claim that there would be a new Ice Age, and made his name again twenty years later with a further claim that global warming would mean apocalyptic floods. The wilder shores of the sexual revolution were explored, Niall Ferguson remarking that the only people who wanted to join the army were women, and the only people who wanted to get married were gays. Feminism, a cause that went back to hesitant beginnings under Kennedy, was vigorously promoted through the courts, and quotas for ‘positive discrimination’ were allowed — although Congress had never voted for this. Equality was applied, with many absurdities resulting (Edward Luttwak got himself off guest lists when he pointed out that heavy military lorries, driven by women, might crash because the driver’s legs were not strong enough for the controls). In Ohio women were at last ‘allowed’ to lift weights heavier than 25 pounds; in February 1972 the ghastly little word ‘Ms’ was allowed in government documents; women were ‘allowed’ to enter sports teams’ locker rooms; in New York women were permitted to become firemen; and in 1978 women were allowed to serve on naval vessels, ten of the first fifty-five becoming pregnant. Here was America at its witches-of-Salem weirdest.
The economy itself was losing the lead that it had had over all others, and, again, inflation had much to do with this. Unions, on the whole, could resist it, at least in the big industrial firms, where blue-collar wages kept up. Labour was all-important for the Democrats, and AFL-CIO grew, up to 1978, as ‘corporatism’ prevailed, but it was increasingly not so much blue-collar workers as soft-professional teachers in the lead. There were alarms as to the competitiveness of American industry. Kenneth Hopper, a Harvard Scottish warhorse, noted (‘American Machinist Special Report’ of July 1970) that output per hour in factories had increased by 20.1 per cent between 1961 and 1965, but by less than half of this figure in the following five years; the growth in take-home earnings fell from 23 per cent to −1.5. The point was that ‘of the major nations of the world, the US reinvests the lowest proportion of its GNP’ — 16.6 per cent as against 23 per cent in Germany and somewhat more in France, or 34 per cent in Japan, such investment including machinery and housing. In engineering, from the mid-fifties onwards, investment was far lower, per $1,000 deliveries, than in Europe or Japan (about $12 as against $60-80), and fixed assets were even below England’s. There was some official dishonesty involved in defence of this: a strange myth was propagated by the OECD that American equipment was only four to five years old, that investment had really been quite adequate, that overinvestment needed to be taxed. The Department of Commerce knew better. America, or parts of it, had been vastly spoiled and had not had to work; even in 1968 some essential structures were over fourteen years old. Congress sometimes ascribed the inflation to business’s desire for capital investment, but in fact new equipment was indeed needed, and what had confused the figures was tax. Depreciation allowances were unreal, and old equipment was recorded as relatively recent. There was also much grumbling that Americans had a low propensity to save (6.1 per cent of their income, whereas the German figure was 13 per cent and the Japanese 20 per cent). But only a fool would have saved in countries where inflation ran in double figures and interest rates in single (or, after tax, half of these).
This was an era when the vast industries and dam projects of the New Deal era lost ground. General Motors, ITT, Union Carbide, US Steel went on in the old way: Cadillacs and Chevrolets were much the same as before, representing strange and classless aspirations for boat-like motor cars; but the Japanese were more subtle. The American share of automobile sales went down from 32 to 19 per cent, of steel from 20 to 12 per cent, and in manufacturing generally from 26 to 20 per cent (1981). The standard of living fell below that of Germany or Sweden, as the GDP per head stood at $6,000 to Switzerland’s $7,000. All in all, much of American industry was now ‘rust belt’. The trade deficit with Japan rose ten times in a few years (to 1978) to $11bn and Japanese goods accounted for a quarter of imports. A good part of the economy appeared anyway to be unreal. In January 1968 credit card debt amounted to $1.5bn, 5 per cent of which went on car loans, and by 1982 grew to $64bn (and by 2004 $576bn). The great new fortunes were built on borrowed money, and inflation now helped to wipe out the debts. Meanwhile, governments struggled to find money for essentials, and America’s infrastructure was shockingly bad. The notion of a direct rail link between Kennedy airport and Manhattan was beyond America’s powers, and no new runway was added to Los Angeles airport between 1970 and 2000. Health care in the United States became yet another piece of black-humour surrealism: a great deal of money spent, but 50 million people not covered by the existing system, such that infant mortality was greater than in blockaded Cuba.