The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy

by Peter Temin

The process became visible in the 1990s when Congress, dominated by the adolescent FTE sector, shut down the government over a dispute with President Clinton and then voted to impeach him. It was even more dramatic in the resolution of the 2000 election to choose Clinton’s successor. The election was close, but it did not end up in the House of Representatives as the Constitution anticipated. Instead it ended in disputed votes in the state of Florida, whose governor was the brother of the Republican candidate George W. Bush. Governor Jeb Bush did not recuse himself, as a judge would have done, but instead worked to certify his brother’s election. Then the Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, 531 US 98 (2000), ruled that there should be no recounts and therefore George W. Bush would be president. The chief justice was William Rehnquist, appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon in 1971 (confirmed in 1972). The memory of democracy assured that this political decision by the Court was accepted peacefully, but the excesses of the process stimulated a literature on how to make sure that people could vote and their votes would count. This literature assumed that public policy would work to restore democracy, while public policy increasingly has worked to restrict influence to an ever richer and more select plutocracy.