The Age of Acquiescence Quotes

“The all-consuming selves we take for granted today are “merely empty receptacles of desire.” Infinitely plastic and decentered, the modern citizen of the republic of consumption lives on slippery terrain, journeying to nowhere in particular. So too, nothing could be more corrosive of the kinds of social sympathy and connectedness that constitute the emotional substructure of collective resistance and rebellion.
Instead, consumer culture cultivates a politics of style and identity focused on the rights and inner psychic freedom of the individual, one not comfortable with an older ethos of social rather than individual liberation. On the contrary, it tends to infantilize, encouraging insatiable cravings for more and more novel forms of a faux self-expression. The individuality it promises is a kind of perpetual tease, nowadays generating, for example, an ever-expanding galaxy of internet apps leaving in their wake a residue of chronic anticipation. Hibernating inside this “material girl” quest for more stuff and self-improvement is a sacramental quest for transcendence, reveries of what might be, a “transubstantiation of goods, using products and gear to create a magical realm in which all is harmony, happiness, and contentment… in which their best and most admirable self will emerge at last.” The privatization of utopia! Still, what else is there?”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“Betrayed and abandoned, cut adrift or superannuated, coerced or manipulated, speeded up, cheated, living in the shadows—this is a recipe for acquiescence. Yet conditions of life and labor as bad as or even far worse than these once were instigators to social upheaval. Alongside the massing of enemies on the outside—employers, insulated and self-protective union leaders, government policy makers, the globalized sweatshop, and the globalized megabank—something in the tissue of working-class life had proved profoundly disempowering and also accounted for the silence.

Work itself had lost its cultural gravitas. What in part qualified the American Revolution as a legitimate overturning of an ancien régime was its political emancipation of labor. Until that time, work was considered a disqualifying disability for participating in public life. It entailed a degree of deference to patrons and a narrow-minded preoccupation with day-to-day affairs that undermined the possibility of disinterested public service. By opening up the possibility of democracy, the Revolution removed, in theory, that crippling impairment and erased an immemorial chasm between those who worked and those who didn’t need to. And by inference this bestowed honor on laboring mankind, a recognition that was to infuse American political culture for generations.

But in our new era, the nature of work, the abuse of work, exploitation at work, and all the prophecies and jeremiads, the condemnations and glorifications embedded in laboring humanity no longer occupied center stage in the theater of public life. The eclipse of the work ethic as a spiritual justification for labor may be liberating. But the spiritless work regimen left behind carries with it no higher justification. This disenchantment is also a disempowerment. The modern work ethic becomes, to cite one trenchant observation, “an ideology propagated by the middle class for the working classes with enough plausibility and truth to make it credible.”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“Tompkins Square set a precedent. In big cities like Chicago similar demonstrations were met with force and the participants were stigmatized by the press and officialdom as “heavily armed German revolutionaries,” “atheists,” believers in “free love,” and potential assassins.”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“In a sense, the farmer was the looniest speculator in a nation overrun with them. He was wagering he would master this fathomlessly intricate global game, pay off his many debts, and come out with enough extra to play another round. On top of that, he was betting on the kindness of Mother Nature, always supremely risky. But the farmer had no choice if he hoped to sustain himself and a way of life, the family farm. Instead, he was drawn into a kind of social suicide. The family farm and the whole network of small-town life that it patronized were being washed away into the rivers of capital and credit that flowed toward the railroads, banks, and commodity exchanges, toward the granaries, wholesalers, and numerous other intermediaries that stood between the farmer and the world market. Disappearing into all the reservoirs of capital accumulation, the family farm increasingly remained a privileged way of life only in sentimental memory.

Perversely the dynamic Lincoln had described as the pathway out of dependency—spending a few years earning wages, saving up, buying a competency, and finally hiring others—now operated in reverse. Starting out as independent farmers, families then slipped inexorably downward, first mortgaging the homestead, then failing under intense pressure to support that mortgage (they called themselves “mortgage slaves”) and falling into tenancy—or into sharecropping if in the South—and finally ending where Lincoln’s story began, as dispossessed farm and migrant laborers.”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“How well we manage the grave dilemmas confronting us now and in the future may depend on how well we grasp the buried truths of our past." (The Age of Acquiescence, pg 13)”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“Abolishing “welfare as we have known it,” as the Clinton administration managed to do, was a way of enlarging the pool of vulnerable, low-wage workers with no other option but to become, if they were able, employees at will, no matter the terms and conditions of their work. What”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“\“Capital has no home,” George Bernard Shaw observed. It is always a transgressor, a disputer of tradition and champion of equality in the abstract while reproducing material inequality in real life: the yuppie was homeless in just this new way. Many others would join their spiritual ranks, but without their more outsized material accoutrements, as the economy came to rest increasingly on the fabricating and manipulation of mass desire and fantasy. No hidebound prejudices, customs, and authorities from the past could be allowed to stand in its way… unless of course they could be rebranded and packaged nostalgically—Marlboro men, faux rednecks, family and family dog behind white picket fences, peasant coffee gatherers, yeomen-farmer wheat growers, and smithies and handicraftsmen in leather smocks—and sold into their own special niche markets.”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“A core paradox was only then surfacing: namely, that if self-expression and self-development could become vendible commodities, that experience could also become disempowering, mocking the quest for individual authenticity. Implicit in a consumer economy floating on a great reservoir of debt is that if you’re having some trouble gratifying your desires, or just getting by, neither the problem nor the solution is social, but simpler and more personal than that: borrow. Life is about now. Between 1979 and 1997 the rate of personal bankruptcy rose by 400 percent. Moreover, shifting the search for meaning and release inward would devalue the political experience, which after all inherently happens in public.”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“Arguably, the essential genius of the American political tradition consists of this complex choreography: accommodating the passions and interests opened up by the protocols of democracy without disturbing the underlying equanimity of capital accumulation and rule by propertied elites. It is a balancing act made even more complicated by the heightened fluidity of the American experience of class hierarchy, perhaps best captured by that old but still cogent observation about “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.”

Nonetheless, rarely if ever in the past has the plutocrat so rooted himself in plebeian culture, erasing all that remained of the habits of deference once expected to inform relations between rulers and the ruled. Nor did he before now build bridges to the lower orders by pointing out precisely what separates them—namely, his unapproachable wealth—using it as a credential of his all-Americanism. Nor have such alliances, when they existed, lasted nearly as long. Nor have so many businessmen assumed second careers as elected officials without any prior experience; on the contrary, many have pointed to their lack of personal political experience as their chief virtue. That, plus offering their long years spent running companies as proving their unique aptitude to govern.”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“Conservative elites first turned to populism as a political strategy thanks to Richard Nixon. His festering resentment of the Establishment’s clubby exclusivity prepared him emotionally to reach out to the “silent majority,” with whom he shared that hostility. Nixon excoriated “our leadership class, the ministers, the college professors, and other teachers… the business leadership class… they have all really let down and become soft.” He looked forward to a new party of independent conservatism resting on a defense of traditional cultural and social norms governing race and religion and the family. It would include elements of blue-collar America estranged from their customary home in the Democratic Party.
Proceeding in fits and starts, this strategic experiment proved its viability during the Reagan era, just when the businessman as populist hero was first flexing his spiritual muscles. Claiming common ground with the folkways of the “good ole boy” working class fell within the comfort zone of a rising milieu of movers and shakers and their political enablers. It was a “politics of recognition”—a rediscovery of the “forgotten man”—or what might be termed identity politics from above.
Soon enough, Bill Clinton perfected the art of the faux Bubba. By that time we were living in the age of the Bubba wannabe—Ross Perot as the “simple country billionaire.” The most improbable members of the “new tycoonery” by then had mastered the art of pandering to populist sentiment. Citibank’s chairman Walter Wriston, who did yeoman work to eviscerate public oversight of the financial sector, proclaimed, “Markets are voting machines; they function by taking referenda” and gave “power to the people.” His bank plastered New York City with clever broadsides linking finance to every material craving, while simultaneously implying that such seductions were unworthy of the people and that the bank knew it. Its $1 billion “Live Richly” ad campaign included folksy homilies: what was then the world’s largest bank invited us to “open a craving account” and pointed out that “money can’t buy you happiness. But it can buy you marshmallows, which are kinda the same thing.” Cuter still and brimming with down-home family values, Citibank’s ads also reminded everybody, “He who dies with the most toys is still dead,” and that “the best table in the city is still the one with your family around it.” Yale preppie George W. Bush, in real life a man with distinctly subpar instincts for the life of the daredevil businessman, was “eating pork rinds and playing horseshoes.” His friends, maverick capitalists all, drove Range Rovers and pickup trucks, donning bib overalls as a kind of political camouflage.”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“Unhorsing capitalism was never the New Deal’s intent anyway. Especially since the outset of the war, the regime had largely come to agreeable terms with big business interests. It shed most programmatic overtures to universalize the welfare state and extend it into areas like health and housing. Structural reconfigurations of power relations in the economy, long-term economic planning, and state ownership or management of capital investments (commonplace during the war) were all offensive to the new centers of the postwar policy making, what soon enough would be widely referred to as the Establishment. Moreover, the “welfare state,” for all the tears now shed over its near death, was in its origins in late-nineteenth-century Europe a creature of conservative elitists like Bismarck or David Lloyd George, and had been opposed by the left as a means of defusing working-class power and independence, a program installed without altering the basic configurations of wealth and political control.
As the center of gravity shifted away from the Keynesian commonwealth toward what one historian has called “commercial Keynesianism” and another “the corporate commonwealth,” labor and its many allies among middle-class progressives and minorities found themselves fighting on less friendly terrain. If they could no longer hope to win in the political arena measures that would benefit all working people—like universal health insurance, for example—trade unions could pursue those objectives for their own members where they were most muscular, especially in core American industries like auto and steel.
So the labor movement increasingly chose to create mini private welfare states.”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“Particularly galling was the way the Homestead Act was abused. Passed during the Civil War, it was supposed to make a reality out of Lincoln’s version of the free labor, free soil dream. But fewer than half a million people actually set up viable farms over nearly half a century. Most public lands were taken over by the railroads, thanks to the government’s beneficent land-grant policy (another form of primitive accumulation); by land speculators backed by eastern bankers, who sometimes hired pretend “homesteaders” in acts of outright fraud; or by giant cattle ranches and timber companies and the like who worked hand in glove with government land agents. As early as 1862 two-thirds of Iowa (or ten million acres) was owned by speculators. Railroads closed off one-third of Kansas to homesteading and that was the best land available. Mushrooming cities back east became, in a kind of historical inversion, the safety valve for overpopulated areas in the west. At least the city held out the prospect of remunerative wage labor if no longer a life of propertied independence. Few city workers had the capital to migrate west anyway; when one Pennsylvania legislator suggested that the state subsidize such moves, he was denounced as “the Pennsylvania Communist” for his trouble.
During the last land boom of the nineteenth century (from about 1883 to 1887), 16 million acres underwent that conversion every year. Railroads doubled down by selling off or mortgaging portions of the public domain they had just been gifted to finance construction or to speculate with. But land-grant roads were built at costs 100 percent greater than warranted and badly built at that, needing to be rebuilt just fifteen years later.”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

“As late as 1919, President Woodrow Wilson cabled Congress from the World War I peace conference in Versailles to confirm precisely that: “The question which stands at the front of all others amidst the present great awakening is the question of labor… how are the men and women who do the daily labor of the world to obtain progressive improvement in the conditions of their labor, to be made happier, and to be served better by the communities and the industries which their labor sustains and advances?”
― Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power