Thom Hartmann on The Hidden History of the American Dream

This is a discussion of an interview 2024-11-21 with Thom Hartmann on his recent book on The Hidden History of the American Dream. A 29:00 mm:ss podcast excerpted from the companion video will be posted here after it is released to the fortnightly "Media & Democracy" show syndicated for the Pacifica Radio Network of over 200 community radio stations.

It is posted here to invite others to contribute other perspectives, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view while citing credible sources and treating others with respect.

Thom Hartmann on The Hidden History of the American Dream: The demise of the middle class — and how to rescue our future

29:00 mm:ss extract from interview recorded 2024-11-21 of w:Thom Hartmann by Spencer Graves about Hartmann’s new book on The Hidden History of the Middle Class.

Thom Hartmann discusses his recent book on The Hidden History of the American Dream with Spencer Graves. This interview was originally produced for Radio Active Magazine on KKFI, Kansas City Community Radio, and for the fortnightly "Media & Democracy" series syndicated for the Pacifica Radio Network of over 200 community radio stations. This conversation focuses especially on Hartmann's recent book and the contributions of overconfidence and media bias to the problems he describes.

Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling author of over thirty-five books and a leading progressive talk radio show host for more than a twenty years. His Hidden History of the American Dream: The demise of the middle class — and how to rescue our future appeared earlier this year. It’s the tenth book he has published in the six years since 2019, in addition to at least 25 others published earlier.

Hartman has had a varied career. Born in 1951, he campaigned with his father for Conservative Republican Barry Goldwater for President in 1964 at age 13. He was expelled from high school during tenth grade for starting a newspaper that protested against the Vietnam War. He later earned a GED and studied electrical engineering at Lansing Community College and Michigan State. He founded his own electrical repair business before taking a job as an engineer with RCA. He also co-founded an herbal products company, a travel company and an advertising agency while also working as a DJ and news director for radio stations.

In 2003 he started a talk radio show, which he has continued in various incarnations since while writing multiple books. In 2016 his talk show was carried by at least 80 radio stations, with at least one each in Africa and England. It is currently offered to the Pacifica Radio Network of over 200 community radio stations as a daily show in three one-hour segments plus a compressed one-hour version. More than half of his guests are Conservatives, who are treated with respect. Hartmann’s goal is an informative discussion of issues, unlike some Conservative talk show hosts, who excel in insults.

Hartman was a keynoter at this year’s Grassroots Radio Conference in New Orleans in September.

Before his (2024) Hidden History of the American Dream, his Hidden History series included:

• (2023) American democracy,
• (2022) big brother in America,
• (2022) neoliberalism,
• (2021) American healthcare,
• (2021) American oligarchy,
• (2020) Monopolies,
• (2020) war on voting,
• (2019) guns and the Second Amendment, and
• ( 2019) Supreme Court.

Highlights

Hartmann said he thought Adam Smith's (1759) Theory of Moral Sentiments was more important than his better known (1776) Wealth of Nations. Hartmann also noted that, "Thomas Paine wrote a piece called Agrarian Justice, in which he proposed what we today call the Social Security program and minimum basic incomes."

Hartmann claimed that Smith's Moral Sentiments

argued that it would be possible that with an unregulated capitalist system, you will always end up with a very small number of very rich people, a very small middle class, and a very large class of the working poor. This is the world that Charles Dickens wrote all his novels about. We are all familiar with the Christmas Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge was actually the middle class. He was not the rich guy. He had a little, small business. ... He only had one employee. And Bob Cratchit, of course, was the bottom 95%.

So what Smith's proposed was that government intervention in the marketplace could be done in a way that would produce a larger middle class, and that that might be a desirable thing, and that actually became a large part of the debate in the 1st couple decades of the brand new American nation. And then it kind of faded out until 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt became president at the time that Franklin Roosevelt became President. In 1933, 15% of us were in the middle class. And that was kind of the peak for America. And no country had ever achieved 50%.

So FDR said, we're going to create a middle class that's more than half of Americans. We're going to fulfill the American dream. And he did that through things like Social Security, unemployment insurance, the absolute right to unionize, minimum wage. These were all market interventions per Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments that produced a middle class, that when Reagan came into office in 1981 was two-thirds of us.

It was something the world had never seen before. It was the fastest growing middle class in 7,000 years of modern history.

And what what ended up bringing that down is another fascinating story ... In 1951, a fellow by the name of Russell Kirk wrote a book called The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, from Edmund Burke to T. S. Eliot. And The Conservative Mind is even today considered the bible of the modern conservative movement. Edmund Burke was an economist and philosopher at the time of the American Revolution. And probably his most famous quote, "It does me no harm if a man is allowed to engage in a profession as servile as that of a candle maker or hairdresser. But it does society considerable violence if such a man is allowed to participate in democratic governance, in other words, to vote. ... And when he wrote this in 1951, we were not yet 50% of us in the middle class.

... What Kirk said was essentially that if the middle class in America gets too large ... it's going to create chaos., three specific chaoses. These aren't so much in Kirk's book as they are the writings around it. William F. Buckley, mostly.

1. Young people will no longer respect their elders, and that'll produce societal chaos.
2. Women will no longer respect their place in the family, and that'll produce, family chaos. And
3. Minorities will demand instant equality with white men, and that will produce absolute social and economic chaos.

... And when Kirk wrote this book, and Buckley was writing pieces about how white people were genetically superior, and all that kind of stuff. He was largely considered a crank even by Republicans, I mean Barry Goldwater was in love with him, but that was about it.

... And so in 1951, when Kirk wrote this book, and Buckley was writing pieces about how white people were genetically superior, ... he was largely considered a crank even by Republicans. Barry Goldwater was in love with him, but that was about it.

But then the sixties happened. In 1960, the birth control pill was legalized by the Food and Drug Administration. So by 1965 ... a large mass of women were able to control their reproductive capacity and were demanding equality in the workplace. ... The Vietnam war got kicked off in 66, 67, and you had young men saying, "Hell, no, I'm not going to go!" and burning their draft cards and protesting in the streets and on the campuses. And this was also the peak decade of the civil rights movement. ... .

And so at that point in the by the late sixties, Republicans looked around and said, "Holy crap! Russell Kirk was right. And we've got to do something about this. This middle class has gotten too large. ...

And so, when Reagan took power in 1981, his explicit mission to save the country was to reduce the size of the middle class. It was two thirds of us at the time. It's 43% of us now.

How do we get from two thirds down to 43%? The first thing Reagan did is he destroyed unions. Fully a third of us were in unions at that time, which which meant that two thirds of Americans had the equivalent of a good Union job, because the Union employers set the wage and benefit floor for everybody. ... We're down to now 11% union density in the United States instead of 33%.

Second, he basically froze the minimum wage. The last time it was raised was about almost 20 years ago. Third he went after social security and changed the way that social security made it taxable and changed the way that the COLAs are calculated, so social security would grow more slowly. You could actually retire and live on social security in 1981, you can't anymore.

And fourth Reagan dropped the tax rate on the morbidly rich, which caused an explosion, a 51 trillion dollars transfer of wealth from the American middle class to the top, 1% over a 43 year period. And then finally Reagan embraced free Trade neoliberalism and began the process of moving all of our factories from the United States to China and Mexico and whatnot.

All of this succeeded in gutting the American middle class. And the real tragedy of it is, you know, this has been a Republican effort since the seventies, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both signed on with all these things.

By and large, Joe Biden was the first president to actually push back on neoliberalism, and he got a lot done. He just never talked about it, which is frankly, I think, why Harris lost the election. ...

But the bottom line is that the American middle class has been under assault. And now comes people like Donald Trump saying, "Oh, yeah, you guys, you know, a third of you have lost your middle class status. And now it takes 2 paychecks to have the same status as you had in 1981 with a single paycheck. And you know who did that. It's those black people who want your job. It's those women in the workplace who want your job. It's those brown people coming from Mexico who want your job. That's who did it to you.

Hartmann also talked about Denmark, which has been among the three "happiest" countries in the world in each of the annual World Happiness Reports between 2013 and 2024, and was the happiest in the first two of those reports. He and his wife, Louise, spent two weeks there roughly a decade ago and interviewed a leading Danish conservative. Hartmann noted that Denmark has free healthcare and asked if he wanted to privatize health care. The guy replied, "Are you crazy?" Hartmann then noted that Danish college students get 300 a month stipend in addition to free tuition and asked if the conservative wanted students to pay for college. The conservative replied, "Are you nuts?" Hartmann then asked, "What makes you a Conservative?" Answer: "I don't want any more of these immigrants."

Hartmann noted that in the 34 richest countries in the world, the 34 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), last year "a total of half a million people ... lost their homes and got wiped out, because somebody got sick in their family ... . Every single one was here in the United States. Among the 34 OECD countries, there's only one that has more than a couple of billion dollars in aggregate student debt, and that country has 2 trillion dollars in aggregate student debt, and that's the United States. ... Louise and I went to Costa Rica a couple of years ago ..., and the cab driver, who drove us from the airport to the place that we had rented, ... was telling us ... about his son, who had just graduated from medical school ... ." Hartmann noted, "That's really cool", and asked, "How does a cab driver's son become a physician?" The cab driver said, "We have free college here. ... We also have free health care. Doctors make about the same as bankers and lawyers. Nobody's getting rich, but he's not going to be poor. He'll have a better life than I have."

Hartmann continued, "Forty-three years of conservative policies of Reaganism have just gutted this country. Every effort to move us forward in the direction that FDR put us on, they've reversed ... . Right wing conservatives on the Supreme Court and our legislature just blocked any serious effort to do anything."

All this has been facilitated by the ultra wealthy buying more media, shifting editorial policies to the right. And Section 230 gives Internet companies a license to make money from increasing political polarization and violence.

The threat

Internet company executives have knowingly increased political polarization and violence including the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, because doing otherwise might have reduced their profits. Documentation of this is summarized in Category:Media reform to improve democracy.

Discussion

[Interested readers are invite to comment here, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources and treating others with respect.]

Bibliography

• Thom Hartmann (2024). The hidden history of the American Dream : the demise of the middle class - and how to rescue our future (in en). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Wikidata Q131016053. ISBN 978-1-5230-0728-8. 
• Thom Hartmann (2023). The hidden history of American democracy : rediscovering humanity's ancient way of living (in en). Wikidata Q131011141. ISBN 978-1-5230-0441-6. 
• Thom Hartmann (2022b). The hidden history of big brother in America : how the death of privacy and the rise of surveillance threaten us and our democracy (in en). Berrett-Koehler Publishers (published 2022). Wikidata Q131011790. ISBN 978-1-5230-0104-0. 
• Thom Hartmann (2022a). The hidden history of neoliberalism : how Reaganism gutted America and how to restore its greatness (in en). Berrett-Koehler Publishers (published 2022). Wikidata Q131013865. ISBN 978-1-5230-0232-0. 
• Thom Hartmann (2021b). why sickness bankrupts you and makes others insanely rich (in en). Berrett-Koehler Publishers (published 2021). Wikidata Q131011157. ISBN 978-1-5230-9163-8. 
• Thom Hartmann (2021a). The hidden history of American oligarchy : reclaiming our democracy from the ruling class (in en). Berrett-Koehler Publishers (published 2021). Wikidata Q131011437. ISBN 978-1-5230-9158-4. 
• Thom Hartmann (2020b). Hidden history of monopolies : how big business destroyed the American dream (in en). Berrett-Koehler Publishers (published 2020). Wikidata Q131013576. ISBN 978-1-5230-8773-0. 
• Thom Hartmann (2020a). The hidden history of the war on voting : who stole your vote, and how to get it back (in en). Berrett-Koehler Publishers (published 2020). Wikidata Q131017302. ISBN 978-1-5230-8778-5. 
• Thom Hartmann (2019b). The hidden history of guns and the Second Amendment (in en). Berrett-Koehler Publishers (published 2019). Wikidata Q131012323. ISBN 978-1-5230-8599-6. 
• Thom Hartmann (2019a). The hidden history of the Supreme Court and the betrayal of America (in en). Berrett-Koehler Publishers (published 2019). Wikidata Q131016701. ISBN 978-1-5230-8594-1.